highest peak in mizoram

India faces a volatile weather mix of severe heatwaves and intense thunderstorms with hail and heavy rains in the coming days. Travelers across various regions, including Delhi, Rajasthan, and the Northeast, should anticipate disruptions to road, rail, and air transport due to these extreme conditions.

A day after the formal launching of the inter-state bi-weekly bus service between Mizoram and Tripura, the first passenger bus from the highest peak of Tripura — Bethliangchhip of Jampui hill in the North — left for Aizawl with 24 passengers on Tuesday.

As the Indian summer has become deadly with air pollution, an analysis of summer air quality, recorded between March and May this year, done by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) has marked Guwahati and Agartala as the most polluted cities in the northeast.

Below-normal rainfall activities in July has left northeast thirsty, ruining the hope carried by good amount of rainfall soon after the onset of monsoon in June.

The Tripura government has said the area where a Shiva temple has been proposed to be built in Phuldungsei village at Thaidowr Tlang is part of the state and that there was “no question of any land dispute”.

Six more members of the Northeast Mount Everest expedition team rewrote history as they reached the top of the world on Saturday morning.

One-fourth decline in daily Covid cases in Assam in last 10 days has brought a major relief amid third wave of the pandemic, but the frontier state of Mizoram remains the only state in the northeast where a surge in daily cases continues with an an alarming positivity rate.

In view of the staggering 346.7% surge in daily Covid-19 cases in Haryana in the last 15 days, the daily cases are projected to peak in the state by mid or end of May, as per the report of Cambridge Judge Business School and the National Institute of Economic and Social Research.

India had around 21.40 lakh people living with HIV/AIDS in 2017, but adult HIV prevalence among 15-49-year-old people has been declining, and was estimated at 0.22% for last year.

The proposed visit of Union health minister, Mansukh Mandaviya, to the northeast on August 17 is expected to send a clear message to the region that it has to pull up its socks before the third wave of Covid-19 strikes, health department sources said.

IMD forecasts relief from heatwave with rainfall predictions for multiple regions including West Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Vidarbha, Telangana, Karnataka, Kerala, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Bihar, West Bengal, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, and Tripura. Monsoon is expected to hit Delhi-NCR around June 30, offering respite from extreme heatwave conditions.

Two Manipuri youths - Chirom Shankar Singh and Phairembam Bidyachand Singh from an NCC Mt Everest team - conquered the world's highest peak on Sunday morning.

The pre-monsoon season ended on Tuesday with excess rainfall in Meghalaya, Assam and Manipur since March 1. But the rainfall distribution pattern has been divergent in Mizoram and Tripura where deficit rainfall was experienced in the last three months.

With the recent uptick in Covid cases, the focus is again on whether states are testing enough to detect cases well in time. Data shows that Kerala, which is in the news for reporting the highest number of cases, is also the leader in testing rates among larger states with a seven-day average of 4,587 tests per million. At the other end of the spectrum, Rajasthan is at just 378 tests per million.

India became the third country in the world to officially record more than 5 lakh deaths from the Covid-19 pandemic, reaching the grim milestone on Thursday. Only the US, with over 9.1 lakh Covid fatalities, and Brazil (nearly 6.3 lakh) have reported more deaths from the virus so far. At 3.3 lakh, the toll from the pandemic in Russia is the fourth highest, ahead of Mexico, which has so far logged just over 3.07 deaths.

India recorded 4,12,784 new cases, by far the highest single-day count in any country so far. The day's death toll climbed close to the 4,000 mark at 3,980. Alarmingly, the record surge in cases came out of a reduced number of tests conducted the previous day. As a result, the test positivity rate (TPR) for the last three days climbed to 24.4%.

The city’s Covid-19 weekly growth rate has exceeded the national average within a few days, standing at 0.7% againist 0.6%, 13th in the country but far ahead of Punjab.