At least 12 companies of Central Armed Police Forces (CAPF) reached West Bengal on Saturday morning as the state prepares to go to elections, officials said.
Assam witnessed violent protests against the Citizenship Act since December 11.
Violent agitations continued to rock parts of West Bengal for second consecutive day on Saturday as people protesting against the amended Citizenship Act set several buses on fire and torched portions of a railway station complex, officials said.
Odisha is bracing for heavy rainfall early next week under the impact of a possible cyclone in the Bay of Bengal, which is likely to skirt the state and move towards West Bengal and Bangladesh, the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) said on Friday.
'When I talk to my colleagues in the Railways, they say 'aadmi toh bohot hai, lekin matlab ka aadmi ek bhi nahi hai (the Railways has a bloated workforce, but doesn't have employees with have the skillsets that matter)'.'
'Seven months he has been in jail for no reason.'
At least 22 more people succumbed to the infection, raising the toll in the state to 10,480.
With Cyclone Phailin set to hit Odisha and Andhra Pradesh coasts on Saturday evening, rail, road and air traffic has been badly disrupted in the states.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will visit Assam and West Bengal to lay the foundation stones of several projects.
'Yaas' is likely to cross the Odisha-West Bengal coasts between Paradip and Sagar Islands around noon on May 26 as a very severe cyclonic storm with wind speeds of 155-165 kmph, Kolkata's Regional Meteorological Centre Deputy Director Sanjib Bandopadhyay said.
The projects - Delhi-Varanasi, Mumbai-Nagpur, Delhi-Ahmedabad, Chennai-Mysore, Delhi-Amritsar, Mumbai-Hyderabad, and Varanasi-Howrah - are expected to cost around Rs 10 trillion.
A portion of the Bardhaman Railway Station building collapsed on Saturday evening, an Eastern Railway official said. Work is on to remove the debris and look for people who might be trapped under it, he said.
Railway officials also indicated that possible 'sabotage' and tampering with the electronic interlocking system, which detects the presence of trains, led to the Friday accident.
Three people were also injured in the incident and are undergoing treatment, a police officer said. The BJP denied the charges and said their members were in no way connected to the incident.
Within hours of assuming office, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Wednesday initiated a major reshuffle in the police hierarchy, transferring 29 top-level police officers, mostly those who were shifted by the election commission prior to the polls.
Principal Secretary of the state health department Bibek Kumar, in his letter to the secretary of the Union ministry of health and family welfare on Friday, described the list as "an erroneous assessment" and said Bengal, keeping in view the parameters set by the Centre, has earmarked four "red" zones -- Kolkata, Howrah, North 24 Parganas and East Midnapore.
"Convict him or acquit him," an anguished Supreme Court observed on non-framing of charges on an accused jailed for 11 years over serial blasts in multiple Rajdhani Express and other trains in 1993.
An officer on Friday said that the police registered suo motu first information reports also against state BJP president Dilip Ghosh, national secretary Arvind Mennon and MPs Arjun Singh and Locket Chatterjee. They were charged with unlawful assembly, rioting, destruction of public property, criminal obstruction and assault on government servant and breaching the disaster management act, he said.
The price will vary depending on the size of the station, but it will be Rs 50 at big stations such as the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus (CSMT) in Mumbai, a Central Railway spokesperson said.
Polling began at 7 am on Saturday for 44 seats in the fourth phase of the West Bengal assembly elections amid tight security, officials said.
Shukla in his resignation letter to Banerjee expressed his willingness to "retire" from politics
A total of 1,177 passengers are booked on the New Delhi-Bilaspur special train, which departed at 4 pm, while 1,122 passengers are booked on the New Delhi-Dibrugarh special train that departed at 4:45 pm.
The ruling TMC in West Bengal was rocked by a fresh bout of desertions on Friday with Banerjee quitting the party and several other leaders rallying behind him.
"We have firmed up an action plan to increase the train speed to up to 160 km per hour on the total 9000-km main trunk routes across the country as part of the Mission Raftaar project. To begin with we have started the work on two major busy routes of Delhi-Mumbai and Delhi-Howrah," said a senior Railway Ministry official involved with the project.
A POCSO court in North 24 Parganas district recently sentenced four persons to 20 years in jail and two others to 10 years in connection with the case of the woman who is now 22 years old.
In two separate attacks, suspected Maoists triggered a blast on the railway tracks in Jharkhand's Giridih district, damaging its fish plates, and also blew up a mobile tower in Hazaribag, the police said.
The cyclone expected to weaken gradually over the next two days.
Calling the political condition prevailing in West Bengal "horrible and frightening", Governor Jagdeep Dhankhar alleged on Tuesday that the people of the state do not have the freedom to exercise their franchise fearlessly.
A Bharatiya Janata Party leader, who the Trinamool Congress said is a brother-in-law of the saffron party's national vice-president Mukul Roy, rejoined the ruling party of West Bengal on Wednesday.
4 EVMs and a similar number of VVPATs were found at the house of a TMC leader in West Bengal's Howrah district, following which a poll official was suspended.
An African footballer was found dead on railway tracks on the Mumbai-Howrah route in Janjgir-Champa district of Chhattisgarh, police said.
Delight family you might visiting abroad with a gift of homemade theplas.
The Election Commission has decided to set up a panel to identify the experiences and shortcomings during the recently-held five assembly polls.
Protests were held in different parts of Kolkata, North 24 Parganas, Hooghly, Howrah, Birbhum, South 24 Parganas, Jalpaiguri districts, and Trinamool Congress supporters briefly blocked roads in some areas.
The BJP could win only 16 out of 57 seats where Shah campaigned.
Protests broke out in some states on Friday, including Delhi's Jama Masjid and stone-petling at policemen in Uttar Pradesh's Prayagraj and Saharanpur, over the controversial remarks on Prophet Muhammad by two now-suspended Bharatiya Janata Party functionaries with demonstrators in Jharkhand injuring a few policemen while authorities in Jammu imposed a curfew in few areas and parts of Kashmir observed a shutdown.
The Railways cancelled three trains from Howrah and diverted as many in view of the train accident in Sainthia, which has claimed 60 lives. The cancelled trains include the Howrah-Amritsar and Howrah-Rampurhat-Howrah passenger, according to the Eastern Railway.
In the wake of the Maoist attack on a Mumbai-bound train in West Midnapore district, the South Eastern Railway cancelled the Howrah-Barbil Janshatabdi Express and Howrah-Jamshedpur Ispat Express on Friday.
'Kavach', which literally means armour, is being promoted by the railways as the world's cheapest automatic train collision protection system.
Amid outrage over the controversial remarks on Prophet Muhammad by the Bharatiya Janata Party's now-sacked two functionaries, Congress leader Shashi Tharoor on Sunday said it is high time Prime Minister Narendra Modi broke his silence on the 'proliferation of hate speech and Islamophobic incidents' in the country, asserting that his silence is interpreted by some as condoning what has been happening.
