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India's Oil and Natural Gas Corp (ONGC) on Wednesday signed a deal with global oil major ExxonMobil Corp for deepwater exploration in India's eastern and western coasts. 

The signing of the Heads of Agreement (HoA) ends ONGC long drawn search of finding a global oil major to partner with in an attempt to quickly monetise its reserves.

India's 53 per cent basin area is offshore. However, it requires sophisticated machinery and manpower to extract the oil from such difficult terrains. ONGC is a giant in the industry but it still lags behind in technological prowess which Exxon is expected to bring onto the table, under the new partnership. 

Trains running across the country like premium Rajdhani Express, Shatabdi Express, Duronto, etc. will become a thing of the past as the Indian Railways has decided to phase out the premium trains, The Railways has made an ambitious roadmap to run semi-high speed trains (160-240 kmph) Vande Bharat and train sets.

The Railways claims that in the next two years, semi-high speed trains between Delhi-Mumbai and Delhi-Kolkata will start filling whereas the target is to connect other metros and big cities of the country in the Amrit period.

Senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad resigned from a key party post in Jammu and Kashmir Congress, hours after he was appointed the chairman of the Jammu and Kashmir Campaign Committee. According to sources, Azad's appointment was viewed as a demotion from his existing role as a member of the All India Political Affairs Committee of the AICC.

According to agency reports quoting sources, Azad cited health reasons to decline the offer. The move comes shortly after Congress president Sonia Gandhi appointed Vikar Rasool Wani as J&K Unit chief of the party and Raman Bhalla as the working president.

In the backdrop of the SSC scam, a single judge-bench of the Calcutta High Court on Tuesday made strong observations that "West Bengal has become such a state where no one can secure or even retain a state government job without paying money. Passing a verdict related to the termination of a primary teacher in a state-run school just four months after his appointment, Calcutta High Court`s single-judge bench of Justice Abhijit Gangopadhyay even referred to the name of the former president of the West Bengal Board of Primary Education (WBBPE) and Trinamool Congress legislator, Manik Bhattacharya in his observation.

The rift within the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in Karnataka came to the fore after a phone recording involving law minister JC Madhuswamy saying the regime was “somehow managing” to run its affairs was made public. Soon after Madhuswamy’s comments came to the fore, his colleagues on Tuesday demanded his resignation. Karnataka chief minister Basavaraj Bommai, however, tried to do damage control by stating that the comments were made in a “different context”.

Reacting to the incident, Madhuswamy said on Tuesday that he was provoked into making these statements.