NEWS

New Delhi: Brahmos, the fastest cruise missile in the world co-developed by India and Russia, will be breaching the mach 7 barrier to become a ‘hypersonic’ system in the next decade.

 “We will require seven to ten years from now to become a hypersonic missile system,” Sudhir Mishra, the chief executive and managing director of the joint venture company Brahmos Aerospace, said in Mumbai over the weekend.

He said the missile, which currently travels at mach 2.8 or 2.8 times the speed of sound, will touch mach 3.5 soon and mach 5 in three years.
The current engine will have to be “tinkered” to achieve mach 5 and will have to be replaced to achieve hypersonic speed, he said. The intent is to come out with a missile that will be able to deliver to the next-generation warfare, Mishra said.

New Delhi: The Income Tax department is chasing 65 lakh people who it suspects did not file returns last year as it hopes to expand the taxpayer base to over 9.3 crore. However, the Union government's drive towards higher compliance has already helped it garner additional Rs 1.5 lakh crore in direct taxes during 2017-18 and get a record number of new filers.

The taxpayer base includes those who file returns in addition to those with tax deducted at source (TDS), tax collected at source (TCS), advance tax payments, self-assessment tax and dividend distribution tax during the previous three financial years. The efforts, including text messages and email campaigns, have helped the government expand the taxpayer base with the authorities expecting an addition of over 1.5 crore new entities during 2017-18 and expanding the base, net of exits by over 12 per cent.

New Delhi: In an important milestone in the country's journey towards universal electricity access, Manipur's Leisang village became the last non-electrified inhabited village to join India's mainline supply network at 5.30pm on Saturday.

This means that all 597,464 inhabited villages in the country now have access to power, fulfilling a promise the PM had made on August 15, 2015, when he announced that all unelectrified villages would get power over the next 1,000 days. The last inhabited village to be powered through the off-grid system — isolated supply networks, mostly with solar power plants — was Pakol, also in Manipur.

New Delhi: In its reply before the special Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) court, the CBI said it had sufficient evidence to establish the charges against former Gujarat Police officers D G Vanzara and N K Amin in the 2004 Ishrat Jahan alleged fake encounter case. The Central Bureau of Investigation opposed the discharge pleas.

After taking the CBI's reply on record, judge J K Pandya adjourned the hearing to May 5. Vanzara has sought discharge from the case contending that the CBI's charge sheet was "concocted" and there is "no prosecutable material" against him.