The 4.5 kilometre-long Silkyara tunnel project in Uttarakhand, which is part of the central government's strategic 900-km 'Char Dham Yatra All Weather Road', will continue after the necessary safety audit and repair of the broken structure, a senior road ministry official said on Wednesday.
'People want to do business in the name of the Kedarnath temple.'
Lifting the ban on the yatra, a division bench of the court comprising Chief Justice R S Chauhan and Justice Alok Kumar Verma said the pilgrimage will start with restrictions like a daily limit on the number of devotees visiting the temples.
Bhandari, a three-term Congress legislator who was also a minister in the state in the past, joined the BJP in the presence of its senior leaders, including Union Minister Piyush Goyal and the party's national general secretary Dushyant Kumar Gautam.
Evacuation of all people stranded in the affected areas of Uttarakhand may take many days considering the scale of devastation and any number of helicopters for rescue job is not enough, a senior army officer said on Friday.
In a video that surfaced online, senior priest Santosh Trivedi alleged that the temple's sanctum sanctorum has been covered with brass plates in the name of gold plating, claiming it is a 'Rs 125 crore scam'.
Many low-lying areas in West Bengal's sub-Himalayan region were reeling from a flood-like situation while major rivers in Bihar were flowing above the danger level at several places as unabated heavy rain lashed the country's eastern parts on Sunday.
Microsoft's Indian-origin CEO Satya Nadella, in communication with employees, said the company will align its cost structure with revenue and customer demand.
Snowfall and rain hit the Char Dham Yatra on Tuesday with thousands of pilgrims halted en route to Kedarnath and Yamunotri temples in the Garhwal Himalayas as a precautionary measure.
A high-level committee constituted by Dhami to look into the Devasthanam Board issue had submitted its recommendations to the chief minister in Rishikesh on Sunday.
Since the yatra began, as many as 28 tourists en route to Kedarnath have died due to various reasons.
'The entire public needs to be evacuated immediately. Any day, the entire town can collapse.'
A helicopter carrying pilgrims from Guptkashi to Kedarnath crashed on Tuesday amid poor visibility and seven people on board are feared dead.
The notification issued by the Union Environment Ministry also exempts projects pertaining to the expansion of terminal buildings at airports (without an increase in the existing area of the airport) from seeking green nod.
These human interventions in nature, along with climate change, are responsible for the disaster faced by the pilgrim town of Joshimath in Uttarakhand, which is sinking, he said.
Snowfall in the higher reaches of Garhwal Himalayas and intermittent rains in lower areas affected the Char Dham yatra on Tuesday with the pilgrimage to the famous Kedarnath shrine suspended till May 16 and yatra to Badrinath halted temporarily.
The Devasthanam Board was assigned the management of 51 temples of the state, including the four famous Himalayan shrines of Badrinath, Kedarnath, Gangotri and Yamunotri.
In Delhi, Union Home Minister Amit Shah assessed the situation in Joshimath and steps taken to ameliorate people's hardship at a meeting attended by Union ministers Nitin Gadkari, R K Singh, Bhupendra Yadav and Gajendra Singh Shekhawat and top officials.
In a letter to the chief secretary, government of Uttarakhand, Union Power Secretary Alok Kumar said the land subsidence in Joshimath was a very old issue, dating back to 1976, and the construction of the 4x130 megawatt Tapovan Vishnugad project started only in 2006 by NTPC.
Devotees were not allowed to enter inside the temple premises when Modi was offering prayers.
The ministry of tourism is less concerned about the impact of the floods on life and property, but is more focused on promoting tourism, says Swathi Seshadri. Anupam Chakravartty reports
He told reporters he did not ask for anything while praying as it is not his nature. "God has given us capacity to give and not demand," he said.
'An earthquake of a slightly higher magnitude in the Western Himalayan region is going to be catastrophic -- not just because of the fragility of the region but because of how densely we have occupied it.'
Tour operators in Odisha are set to suffer losses as tourists and pilgrims have started cancelling their bookings to various destinations in north India following the devastating floods in Uttarakhand.
The death toll in the Uttarkashi bus accident rose to 26 with the recovery of one more body after which the search and rescue operation was concluded, officials said on Monday.
Around 1,000 devotees will be allowed to visit Kedarnath shrine daily when its portals are opened on May 4, Chief Minister Harish Rawat said and sought to allay safety concerns of pilgrims.
The temple doors were opened at 8.50 am and the prime minister arrived just about half an hour later to offer prayers and perform a 'rudrabhishek'.
'My belief that I could protect the Himalayas was shattered.'
The Uttarakhand government on Tuesday put the number of missing people in last month's tragedy at 5,360 and announced that pilgrimage to Badrinath, Gangotri and Yamunotri shrines will resume by September 30 even as fresh rains pounded several parts of the state and claimed 11 lives.
With questions being raised whether large-scale deaths in Uttarkhand could have been averted, the MeT department today said it had issued "timely" warnings of heavy rains and landslides while the state government claimed there was not enough prior indication of a "crisis of this magnitude".
Union Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde on Tuesday said that he had asked the Uttarakhand government not to allow any VIP to land in the flood ravaged areas in the state to pre-empt any disturbance to relief work.
'Half of China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar, which are among the most populous countries in the world, are dependent on the rivers and glaciers of the Himalayas for sustenance.'
'If Modi-Shah had not changed the leadership, one section would have parted ways with the BJP for sure.'
The Garhwal region collectively has deposits worth Rs 2,100 crore and advances worth Rs 1,000 crore.
A month after the worst natural calamity in Uttarakhand, the state government, which is grappling with a myriad of daunting tasks, on Tuesday started distributing compensation to the next of the kin of those killed in the devastating floods.
'How much rain fell on June 16 and 17 is NOT known because the area of Kedarnath is not covered by the Indian Meteorological Department,' M Shashidhar Reddy, vice chairman of the National Disaster Management Authority tells Sheela Bhatt. Because of this, the NDMA will not know "what exactly happened over there, in and around the Kedarnath temple."
Rahul Gandhi reached the revered ancient Kedarnath shrine in the lower Himalayas on Friday morning
Scientists believe the unique geological locations where they are situated makes them worthy of veneration.
Sudhir Bisht recalls the battle of 1984, in which UP's strongman H N Bahuguna was felled by Bollywood superstar turned political novice Amitabh Bachchan.
Fires are blazing across Jammu and Kashmir, the state of Uttarakhand and have reached the doorstep of Himachal Pradesh's capital city Shimla.
