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The foreign ministry’s remarks came a day after President Xi ordered the military to scale up the battle preparedness.

PTI

China on Wednesday said that the situation at the border with India is “overall stable and controllable,” and both the countries have proper mechanisms and communication channels to resolve the issues through a dialogue and consultation.

The comments by the Foreign Ministry spokesman came in the backdrop of the continuing standoff between the militaries of India and China at the Line of Actual Control (LAC).

Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian, during a media briefing here, said that China’s position on the border related issues is clear and consistent.

“We have been following the important consensus reached by the two leaders and strictly observing the agreements between the two countries,” he said, apparently referring to the directions of Chinese President Xi Jinping and Prime Minister Narendra Modi after their two informal summits, asking the militaries of the two countries to take more confidence building measures to maintain peace and tranquillity along the borders.

The foreign ministry’s remarks came a day after President Xi ordered the military to scale up the battle preparedness, visualising the worst-case scenarios and asked it to resolutely defend the country’s sovereignty.

Mr. Zhao said: “We are committed to safeguarding our territorial sovereignty and security, and safeguarding peace and stability in the border areas. Now the China-India border area situation is overall stable and controllable”.

Between the two countries, we have good border related mechanism and communication channels. We are capable of resolving the issues properly though dialogue and consultation,” he said, confirming reports that the diplomatic efforts were on to ease the border tensions.

Asked where the talks are taking place, Mr. Zhao said the two countries have established border related mechanisms and diplomatic channels.

This includes the communication between border troops and between our diplomatic missions, he added.

The nearly 3,500-km-long LAC is the de-facto border between the two countries.

Several areas along the LAC in Ladakh and North Sikkim have witnessed major military build-up by both the Indian and Chinese armies recently, in a clear signal of escalating tension and hardening of respective positions by the two sides even two weeks after they were engaged in two separate face-offs.

India has said the Chinese military was hindering normal patrolling by its troops along the LAC in Ladakh and Sikkim and strongly refuted Beijing’s contention that the escalating tension between the two armies was triggered by trespassing of Indian forces across the Chinese side.

The Ministry of External Affairs said all Indian activities were carried out on its side of the border, asserting that India has always taken a very responsible approach towards border management. At the same time, it said, India was deeply committed to protect its sovereignty and security.

“Any suggestion that Indian troops had undertaken activity across the LAC in the Western sector or the Sikkim sector is not accurate. Indian troops are fully familiar with the alignment of the Line of Actual Control in the India-China border areas and abide by it scrupulously,” MEA Spokesperson Anurag Srivastava said at an online media briefing last week.

PTI

New Delhi: The death toll due to COVID-19 rose to 4,364 in the country, while the number of cases climbed to 1,53,072, registering an increase of 146 deaths and 6,535 cases since Monday 8 am, the Union Health Ministry said

The number of active COVID-19 cases climbed to 83,941. As many as 60,490 people have recovered and one patient has migrated, it said.

“Thus, around 41.61 per cent patients have recovered so far,” a senior Health Ministry official said

The total confirmed cases includes foreigners

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.

Of the total 4,167 fatalities, Maharashtra tops the tally with 1,695 deaths followed by Gujarat with 888 deaths, Madhya Pradesh with 300, West Bengal with 278, Delhi with 276, Rajasthan with 167, Uttar Pradesh with 165, Tamil Nadu with 118 and Andhra Pradesh and Telangana with 56 deaths each.

The death toll reached 44 in Karnataka and 40 in Punjab

Jammu and Kashmir has reported 23 fatalities due to the disease, Haryana has 16 deaths, while Bihar has registered 13 and Odisha has seven deaths

Kerala and Himachal Pradesh have reported five deaths each so far, while Jharkhand and Assam have recorded four deaths each so far

Chandigarh and Uttarakhand each have recorded three COVID-19 fatalities each, while Meghalaya has reported one fatality so far, according to the ministry data.

More than 70 per cent of the deaths are due to comorbidities, according to the ministry’s website.

According to the ministry data updated in the morning, the highest number of confirmed cases in the country are from Maharashtra at 52,667 followed by Tamil Nadu at 17,082, Gujarat at 14,460, Delhi at 14,053, Rajasthan at 7,300, Madhya Pradesh at 6,859 and Uttar Pradesh at 6,532.

The number of COVID-19 cases has gone up to 3,816 in West Bengal, 3,110 in Andhra Pradesh and 2,730 in Bihar. It has risen to 2,182 in Karnataka, 2,060 in Punjab, 1,920 in Telangana, 1,668 in Jammu and Kashmir and 1,438 in Odisha

Haryana has reported 1,184 coronavirus infection cases so far, while Kerala has 896 cases. A total of 526 people have been infected with the virus in Assam and 377 in Jharkhand

Uttarakhand has 349 cases, Chhattisgarh has 291, Chandigarh has reported 238 cases, Himachal Pradesh has 223, Tripura has 194 and Goa has registered 67 cases so far

Ladakh has reported 52 COVID-19 cases, Puducherry has 41 instances of the infection, Manipur has 39 while Andaman and Nicobar Islands has registered 33 infections

Meghalaya has registered 14 cases. Nagaland has reported three cases of the infection, Dadar and Nagar Haveli and Arunachal Pradesh have reported two cases of the virus each, while Mizoram and Sikkim have reported a case each till how

“2,970 cases are being reassigned to states,” the ministry said on its website, adding, “Our figures are being reconciled with the ICMR.”

State-wise distribution is subject to further verification and reconciliation, it said.

PTI

Noida: Six people, including two women, were arrested from a guesthouse in Greater Noida on Tuesday in a police raid that busted an alleged sex racket, officials said.

Those arrested include the owner and the manager of the guesthouse located in Sigma 1 residential area, under Beta II police station limits, the officials said.

“The police had got a tip-off about illegal flesh trade taking place for quite some time from the guesthouse after which a raid was carried out. During inspection, the information was found correct and six people arrested from the spot,” Deputy Commissioner of Police, Greater Noida, Rajesh Kumar Singh said.

Rs 12,600 in cash, mobile phones, make-up kits, condoms and contraceptive pills were seized from the rooms, the police said.

An FIR has been registered against the accused person and further proceedings were underway, the police added.

There was no clarity yet on whether private airlines allowed to operate flights under the government’s Vande Bharat Mission for repatriation of Indians will also be able to do the same

Indians stranded around the world may soon be able to book Vande Bharat flights directly on Air India’s website, according to a senior official of the Ministry of External Affairs.

“We are doing this as a trial, but the airline will continue to be assisted by our foreign missions and the criteria for identifying passengers in distress will also apply,” the source explained.

There was no clarity yet on whether private airlines allowed to operate flights under the government’s Vande Bharat Mission for repatriation of Indians will also be able to do the same.

The government plans to bring back 1,00,000 passengers from 60 countries in the second phase of the mission, which is under way.

“Our preparations for the third phase has started, we will be widening our footprint. The plan is to increase our entry points into India as well as expand domestic feeder flights,” said the official.

With inputs from The Hindu

The sooner we get out of it, the better, he says during an interaction with public health experts

Former Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday said that a full lockdown was damaging and the sooner we got out of it, the better. He said this during an online interaction with Prof. Johan Giesecke, member of the Technical Advisory Group for Infectious Hazards of WHO, and Prof. Ashish Jha, Dean of Brown University School of Public Health, as part of his series on interacting with public health experts.

While answering a question from Prof. Giesecke on how India was balancing between disease and economy, Mr. Gandhi said, “Well, we got a full lockdown and I am sceptical of a full lockdown myself. I do think that one has to move to a partial lockdown. I think the full lockdown is damaging and the damage increases exponentially. The sooner you get out of the lockdown, better it is.”

He also accepted the suggestion by Prof. Giescke that more may die due to severe lockdown than the disease. Prof. Giescke, who works with Karolinska Institute, Sweden, spoke about his country, where the lockdown is far more relaxed.

His interaction with both the experts were centred on the question of exit strategy to get out of the lockdown. He posed this question to both the experts. The lockdown, he said, had brought about a psychological change. “When you classify the disease and then you say that we are going to have a lockdown, you change the psychology of the people, of the population, who are suddenly convinced that this is a very dangerous thing… you can’t just blow open the doors,” Mr. Gandhi said, speaking to Prof. Jha.

Prof. Jha agreed that while the lockdown helped in slowing down the spread of the virus, it could not be the goal unto itself. He also said that the government should communicate to the public and be candid about it. He said that the projections that the virus would slow down in next few months were wrong. Till a vaccine was found, which could take up to 18 months, life will more or less remain the same as it was under the lockdown.

Mr. Gandhi said that during his interactions with the migrant labourers he understood that it was the uncertainty of what lay in the future that was frightening for them.

Mr. Gandhi and Prof. Jha spoke at length about testing. Mr. Gandhi claimed that he had been told unofficially by bureaucrats that the reasons testing figures were low was because it would “frighten the people”.

He also pressed for more decentralisation in this fight against the pandemic. “The States that spread more power closer to the people will do better,” he said.

To a question by Prof. Jha on how the virus would change the world, Mr. Gandhi said that the virus was changing the world at a molecular level by attacking the globalised structure and changing the power equations. “I think the balance of power between the U.S. and China will change. People say that 9/11 was a new chapter. This is a new book,” he said.

The interaction was put up by the Congress on its social media platforms.

With inputs from The Hindu