The meeting was attended by 26 participants including Chief Ministers and Lt Governors of UTs, he said while briefing the media.
The counting of votes will take place on November 2.
Several leading scientists, academicians, and agriculturalists have called for raising government support for research and development to make Indian agriculture future-ready.
Saturday's voting will mark the end to the marathon polling process that began on April 19 month and has already covered 486 Lok Sabha seats in 28 states and Union territories.
BJP may get up to a maximum of 115 of the total 182 seats and the Congress 65.
Sixty-eight Rajya Sabha members, including nine Union ministers, are completing their tenure this year, triggering a race of sorts among leaders across political parties to eye a six-year term in the Upper House of Parliament.
The electoral exercise, the first since the Lok Sabha elections, will decide the fate of many veterans and some debutantes including Himachal Pradesh Chief Minister Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu's wife Kamlesh Thakur.
Political observers lauded the SP's choices in fielding several non-Yadav and Scheduled Caste candidates, the party's alliance with the Congress, and Rahul Gandhi's campaign around the danger to the Constitution if the BJP won a big majority.
'Women' as a political constituency appears to be an idea that has come of age. It is changing India in ways that we only dimly understand, asserts Aditi Phadnis.
"Word of the day! Definition of *snollygoster* US dialect: a shrewd, unprincipled politician. First Known Use: 1845. Most recent use: 26/7/17," Tharoor had tweeted in 2017.
West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, however, was conspicuous by her absence at the event, which was attended by tens of thousands of people as the Congress sought to promote opposition unity.
Among the fatalities recorded on Friday, the maximum 17 were from Uttar Pradesh, 14 from Bihar, five from Odisha and four from Jharkhand, where officials said more than 1,300 people are hospitalised with heatstroke conditions.
The current spell of weak monsoon over the country is likely to continue for the next five days, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) said on Wednesday.
100 per cent coverage in Kerala and Pondicherry.
India recorded around 16 per cent more rainfall than normal in August, with rainfall over Northwest India recorded at 253.9 mm, the second highest in August since 2001, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) said on Saturday.
Seven out of eight women street vendors reported experiencing high blood pressure, while women in the middle age group raised concerns about delays in their menstrual cycles due to the extreme heat.
KC Venugopal mentioned that the Congress's goal is to diminish the BJP's representation in Uttar Pradesh by securing half of the seats in the state.
The constitution of a committee by the Centre to explore the feasibility of "one nation, one election" has opened up the possibility of Lok Sabha polls being advanced so that they could be held with a string of state assembly polls.
The Bharatiya Janata Party on Saturday appointed election in-charges and co-in-charges for 23 states and Union territories in view of the Lok Sabha polls this year.
Nasscom Foundation along with Google has set up a call centre in collaboration with a not-for-profit body ISAP to help women farmers scale up their business. The project is being run on a pilot basis to initially reach out to 20,000 rural women entrepreneurs across six states -- Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Haryana and Rajasthan, Nasscom Foundation CEO Nidhi Bhasin said at the launch of "DigiVaani Call Center". "DigiVaani will be one place where rural women entrepreneurs will be able to call and get the information around various schemes available for them, which can help them scale up their business, be it government scheme or any other information that can be of help for them.
While three deaths were reported from Gujarat, two were from Himachal Pradesh and one each from Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, Odisha and Uttar Pradesh besides one reconciled by Kerala, the data updated at 8 am stated.
At the rally in Shimla's Ridge Maidan to mark the eighth anniversary of becoming prime minister, Modi said, "Now our borders are more secure than they were before 2014."
The central agency registered 23 separate cases on November 14 against 83 people allegedly involved in online child sexual abuse and exploitation, they said.
Nepali labourers are not only the backbone of the state's apple economy but also part of the highly grounded manpower in the orchards, setting an example for other states struggling with the migrant labour question, reports Ashwani Sharma.
Union minister Chirag Paswan, who joined politics after a failed Bollywood debut, has no plans to make a comeback in films and also jokes that he is such a 'bad actor' that even his Lok Sabha colleague and first co-star, Kangana Ranaut, will not agree to share the screen space with him again.
A round-up of the Ranji Trophy matches played on Saturday.
The study noted that nine of 30 large states -- Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Telangana, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, West Bengal, Odisha, and Gujarat -- have high vulnerability to be impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
India has recorded 9,111 new coronavirus infections, while active cases have increased to 60,313, according to the Union health ministry data updated on Monday.
Just eight months after its good showing in the Lok Sabha polls, the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) seems to be running out of steam with internal bickering and conflicting ambitions resulting in diminishing electoral returns that have once again put the Bharatiya Janata Party in the driver's seat in national politics.
A round-up of the Ranji Trophy matches played on Saturday.
One out of every six sedition cases registered in India between 2014 and 2021 came from Assam.
A parliamentary committee has recommended that the medium of instruction in technical and non-technical higher education institutes such as IITs in Hindi-speaking states should be Hindi and in other parts of India their respective local language. It said the use of English should be made optional.
The Samyukta Kisan Morcha, an umbrella body of farmer organisations that spearheaded the 2021 protest, adopted the resolution to "intensify the fight against the policies of the Union government to save farming, food security, land and livelihoods of the people".
The threshold for a heat wave is met when the maximum temperature of a weather station reaches at least 40 degrees Celsius in the plains, 37 degrees in coastal areas, and 30 degrees in hilly regions, and the departure from normal is at least 4.5 notches.
A total 134 deaths deaths were reported since Wednesday morning, of which 54 were in Maharashtra, 29 in Gujarat, 20 in Delhi, 9 in West Bengal, seven in Madhya Pradesh, four in Rajasthan, three in Tamil Nadu, two each in Telangana and Karnataka and one each in Andhra Pradesh,Bihar, Jammu and Kashmir and Uttar Pradesh.
The revised budget for 2024-25 shows a sharp rise in the allocations, particularly for major irrigation projects and the Namami Gange Mission-II.
Rescuers at the under-construction tunnel collapse site in Uttarkashi on Tuesday initiated the process of inserting large-diameter mild steel pipes through the rubble using an auger machine to rescue the 40 workers trapped for two days now, officials said.
Thursday was the day results from the Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh assembly elections and by-elections in Bihar, Odisha and Uttar Pradesh were out, so what were some of our leaders up to?
Of the 2,206 fatalities, Maharashtra tops the tally with 832 fatalities, Gujarat comes second with 493 deaths, followed by Madhya Pradesh at 215, West Bengal at 185, Rajasthan at 107, Uttar Pradesh at 74, Delhi at 73, Tamil Nadu at 47 and Andhra Pradesh at 45.
