Morning Brief: Rs 3L Crore New Roads Push; Afghan Prez In Delhi; Akhilesh Yadav Sacks His Uncle

Massive Infra Push

The Centre is drawing up plans to develop 40 economic corridors, spanning 35,000 km, out of which 21,000 km will be economic corridors and the remaining, feeder routes to facilitate movement of freight traffic. The estimated cost of the proposed project is Rs 3 lakh crore.

One example of such economic corridor is the Agra-Gwalior-Shivpuri-Guna-Biaora-Dewas-Indore-Sendhwa-Dhule-Malegaon-Nashik-Mumbai route. This will reduce Agra-to-Mumbai road travel to 853 km from around 1,200 km at present.

Apart from these 40 corridors, the road ministry is also planning National Grid project which entails the creation of a grid of 27 horizontal and vertical national highway corridors every 250 km.

Lucknow Drama

Within hours of Mulayam Singh Yadav replacing his son with his brother Shivpal Yadav as party chief in Uttar Pradesh, chief minister Akhilesh Yadav sacked his uncle Shivpal from all important ministries barring wasteland development.

Mulayam’s move to instal his brother as party head in the poll-bound state came after Akhilesh shunted out Deepak Singhal, a Shivpal favourite, from the post of chief secretary on Tuesday. On Monday, he had sacked two ministers, Gayatri Prajapati and Rajkishore Singh, close to Shivpal.

Ghani In Delhi

Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani will arrive in Delhi today on a two-day visit to hold “close consultations” on key issues with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who may accede to the Afghanistan demand of increased defence supplies, including lethal weapons from India.

Last year, India had supplied four Mi-25 attack helicopters to the war-torn country, first of such transfer since the Taliban were overthrown in 2001.

Hyperloop In Pune?

Union Transport Minister has revealed that during his recent visit to the American west-coast, he met with car company Tesla’s officials and offered them westerly bypass of Pune connected to the Express Highway to experiment with the Hyperloop technology that is the brainchild of company’s founder, Elon Musk.

Hyperloop is a tube which uses air for propulsion and runs faster than an aircraft at a speed of 1,120 kmph and can cover the distance between, say Nagpur and Mumbai in 35 minutes.

Apart from this, Gadkari said he urged Tesla set up a manufacturing base here and offered land free of cost near some ports.

Calm Down

The Central government has quietly moved an entire brigade into South Kashmir as part of operation ‘Calm Down’ to clear it of militants and protesters. Nearly 4,000 troops have been pressed into service to restore normalcy. They have clear instructions to use minimum force.

The army troops are combing the areas and clearing the roadblocks put by the protesters by felling trees, electric poles and placing huge boulders and burnt vehicles, to facilitate movement of people.

After clearing Pulwama, the troops have moved into Shopian and Kulgam.

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