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.
The Bharatiya Janata Party was on Thursday poised for a landslide victory in Gujarat to retain power for a record seventh straight term but was behind the Congress in Himachal Pradesh which could go with the trend of alternative governments in the hill state.
The BJP holds 28 of the 59 Rajya Sabha seats that will soon face election.
Reacting to the results, Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra said that in the by-elections held on 13 seats in seven states, the people of the country have given their support to the INDIA bloc.
If the Congress comes to power in the state, it will not allow his government to work, Modi claimed.
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.
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 Congress on Tuesday suffered a major upset in Himachal Pradesh at the hands of the Bharatiya Janata Party in the Rajya Sabha elections which were marred by cross-voting in all the three states though it won three seats in Karnataka while the saffron party pocketed an extra seat in Uttar Pradesh.
Uttar Pradesh and Bihar appear to have got the maximum representation in Prime Minister Narendra Modi's new council of ministers, while assembly poll-bound Maharashtra also found a significant presence.
The Election Commission on Wednesday slapped show-cause notices on Bharatiya Janata Party leader Dilip Ghosh and Congress leader Supriya Shrinate for their offensive remarks against West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and Kangana Ranaut respectively.
All educational institutions in Shimla and Kullu districts will remain closed on Monday as heavy to extremely heavy rains continue to lash the state, district officials said.
It will be interesting to see what shifts have been recorded in the last decade-and-a-half -- from the effects of demonetisation and Covid's second wave to the drop in fertility and increase in farm workers -- but we will only know this if and when the Census is conducted, points out Aakar Patel.
Former Congress president Sonia Gandhi, BJP chief J P Nadda and new party entrant Ashok Chavan and Union ministers Ashwini Vaishnaw and L Murugan were among the 41 candidates elected unopposed to Rajya Sabha on Tuesday while Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh will witness polling on February 27.
One out of every six sedition cases registered in India between 2014 and 2021 came from Assam.
The number of public holidays varies from 14 in Delhi to 34 in Odisha.
Tomato prices have been on the boil for more than a month. Data from major cities show that the spike has been between 125 and 150 per cent at the wholesale level. Soaring vegetable prices, including tomatoes, pushed the retail inflation rate to a nine-month high of 5.49 per cent in September, according to government data. Though reports say prices are expected to come down in the next few weeks after supplies improve from Madhya Pradesh and Himachal Pradesh, how long will the respite last is anybody's guess.
The states were advised to conduct surveillance and report district-wise severe acute respiratory illness and influenza-like illness cases on a daily basis and also to send these for genome sequencing to the mapped INSACOG laboratories.
'If we get 399 seats and you say we have not crossed 400, then it is your wisdom. But the '400 paar' slogan is based on calculation and considered opinion'
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Uttarakhand saw the sharpest decline (of 11 per cent) in the "total persons engaged" in manufacturing in the worst-hit pandemic year of 2020-21 as industrial units shut shop, according to the latest Annual Survey of Industries (ASI) data, released by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI). This was followed by the decline in the workforce in states such as Jharkhand (8.9 per cent), West Bengal (8.3 per cent), Kerala (8 per cent), and Karnataka (7.8 per cent). The "total persons engaged" in an enterprise is defined as the sum of directly employed workers, supervisory or managerial workers, and the unpaid family members who might be engaged in the enterprise.
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.
Polling is scheduled in all 13 seats of Punjab and four of Himachal Pradesh, 13 constituencies in Uttar Pradesh, nine in West Bengal, eight in Bihar, six in Odisha and three seats in Jharkhand besides Chandigarh.
RCom and Aircel have permits for 3G services in 13 out of 22 service areas while Tata Teleservices has permit in 9 circles.
Despite high exposure to floods, Assam, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Odisha, and Sikkim are the best performing states in terms of flood early warning systems (EWS), according to the report by independent policy research think tank The Council on Energy Environment and Water.
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What some of our leaders were up to on Monday, December 12.
Mercury hovered around 40 degrees Celsius in large parts of the country on Monday as the Indian meteorological department predicted heat wave conditions in parts of east India over the next four days and the northwest region over the next two days.
Close to half of the total 543 Lok Sabha seats are bracing for multi-cornered fight this time, making the contest way more interesting and intense than it was in the 2019 elections.
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 number of active COVID-19 cases stood at 29,685, while 11,761 people have recovered and one patient has migrated, it said.
Of the total 452 deaths, Maharashtra tops the tally with 194 fatalities, followed by Madhya Pradesh at 57, Gujarat and Delhi at 38 each and Telengana 18.
The government worked out a package -- which included tax paybacks and concessional power -- to match the benefits the plant would have enjoyed in Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh, both designated backward areas that attracted central tax concessions.
Chief ministers of three Congress-ruled states -- Karnataka's Siddaramaiah, Himachal Pradesh's Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu and Telangana's Revanth Reddy -- have announced they will not attend the NITI Aayog meeting over alleged bias against their states in the Union Budget.
For Tuesday, the IMD said heavy to very heavy rains, with extremely heavy rainfall at isolated places, are likely over Assam and Meghalaya.
Rediff Labs brings you the election affidavits of all candidates in the fray in the seventh and last phase of polling for the Lok Sabha elections.
Of the 146 deaths reported since Monday morning, 60 were in Maharashtra, 30 in Gujarat, 15 in Delhi, 10 in Madhya Pradesh, seven in Tamil Nadu, six in West Bengal, four each in Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan, three in Telangana, two each in Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir and Karnataka and one in Kerala.
The storm would continue to move north-northwestwards, intensify further and reach north Bay of Bengal near West Bengal and the adjoining north Odisha and Bangladesh coasts by the morning of May 26
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West Bengal, Odisha, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh are the states most likely to be hit again.
Thunderstorms and dust storms are 'very likely' on Tuesday too, the weather office warned.
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