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1) Human brains found at archaeological sites are surprisingly well-preserved: By Nora Bradford

Remains of human brains were considered rare, but not anymore. Early in her research, forensic anthropologist Alexandra Morton-Hayward came across a paper describing a 2,500-year-old brain preserved in a severed skull. The paper referenced another preserved brain. She found another. And another. By the time she’d reached 12, she noticed all of the papers described the brains as a unique phenomenon. She kept digging.

Naturally preserved brains, it turns out, aren’t so rare after all, Morton-Hayward, of the University of Oxford, and colleagues report March 20 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The researchers have built an archive of 4,400 human brains preserved in the archaeological record, some dating back nearly 12,000 years. The archive includes brains from North Pole explorers, Inca sacrificial victims and Spanish Civil War soldiers.Because the brains have been described as exceptionally rare, little research has been done on them. “If they’re precious, one-of-a-kind materials, then you don’t want to analyze them or disturb them,” Morton-Hayward says. Less than 1 percent of the archive has been investigated.

Matching where the brains were found with historical climate patterns hints at what might keep the brains from decaying. Over a third of the samples persisted because of dehydration; others were frozen or tanned. Depending on the conditions, the brains’ texture could be anywhere from dry and brittle to squishy and tofulike.

About a quarter of the brains came from bodies without any other preserved soft tissue. No skin, kidneys or muscles, “just this shrunken perfect little brain rattling around in a skull,” Morton-Hayward says.

Why brains persist when other soft tissue degrades is unclear, but the answer could lie in the organ’s chemical makeup. The ratio of proteins to lipids within the brain is unique, at 1-to-1. Other soft tissues have more carbohydrates and very different ratios of proteins to lipids. This ratio might be important because when metals like iron enter the mix, they could prompt proteins and lipids to fuse together and endure.

The team is now using new tools to better understand the molecular interactions behind brain preservation.

2) First pig liver transplanted into a person lasts for 10 daysBy Smriti Mallapaty

Pig organs could provide temporary detox for people whose livers need time to recover or who are awaiting human donors. In a milestone for the transplantation of animal organs into people, a 50-year-old clinically dead man in China has become the first person to receive a liver from a pig. With consent from the man’s family, researchers stitched the organ, from a genetically engineered miniature pig, to the man’s blood vessels, where it remained for ten days. It has been surgically removed today, says Dou Kefeng, one of the surgeons who led the transplant at Xijing Hospital of the Air Force Medical University in Xi’an. “Our study has just been terminated, and the colour and texture of the pig liver [transplant] are generally normal.”

The procedure was intended to test whether genetically modified pig organs could one day be used to supply hospitals for transplants. In China alone, hundreds of thousands of people experience liver failure every year, but only around 6,000 received a liver transplant in 2022. In the past few years, surgeons in the United States have transplanted pig hearts into two living people, and transplanted hearts and kidneys to several people declared dead because they lack brain function.

The Xijing surgeons say the pig liver secreted more than 30 millilitres of bile every day, a sign that it was functioning.

Researchers who specialize in transplanting animal organs into people, known as xenotransplantation, are eager to see more details about the procedure’s safety and functional benefits, and to learn from the work.

“This is a really exciting study,” says Ping Li, a transplant researcher at Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis.

Important insights

The surgery marks the first time a pig liver has been transplanted into a human. However, in January, a team led by transplant surgeon Abraham Shaked at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia connected a clinically dead person to a genetically modified pig’s liver located outside their body. The organ circulated the person’s blood for three days.It is “heart-warming” to see researchers pursuing xenotransplantation all over the world, says Muhammad Mohiuddin, the surgeon and researcher who led the pig-heart transplants in living people. “It’s an expensive process, but it has a huge amount of potential,” says Mohiuddin, who is at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore and is president of the International Xenotransplantation Association.

Luhan Yang, chief executive of Qihan Biotech in Hangzhou, China, which is developing gene-edited pigs as a source for organs, says she expects more xenotransplants in clinically dead people or — for compassionate reasons — in terminally ill people in the United States, China and Europe in the coming years.

The Chinese study will offer important insights into whether pig-liver transplants can keep people alive, even just for a few days, says David Cooper, a xenotransplant immunologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

Ten days

On 10 March, the Xijing Hospital team, including Dou, Tao Kaishan and Wang Lin transplanted a pig liver weighing 700 grams into the donor, who lacked cognitive function. The surgery took roughly nine hours to perform. The donor received a daily regimen of immunosuppressive drugs, and his original liver was left in place.

The liver came from a Bama miniature pig (Sus scrofa domestica) bred by the company Clonorgan Biotechnology in Chengdu, China. It contained six genetic modifications, says Wang. These deactivated three genes for proteins found on the surface of pig cells and introduced three genes for human proteins, to prevent the donor from rejecting the pig organ.

Dou says the pig was bred in a specialized pathogen-free facility and tested negative for about a dozen pathogens, including Streptococcus suis, the type-2 strain of Mycoplasma pneumoniae and porcine cytomegalovirus. So far, he has not seen signs of an immediate form of organ rejection and the liver is producing bile. “This is encouraging,” says Cooper.

The researchers have also taken daily blood samples and liver biopsies and will assess immune response, infection risk and liver function in detail. “We’re having a pathologist evaluate if there’s acute rejection,” says Dou.

The surgery was approved by the recipient’s family and several university committees, says Wang. “It has been strictly carried out according to relevant national and international regulations.”

Temporary fix?

The researchers plan to repeat the procedure in another clinically dead person later this year — and next time they will remove the person’s existing liver.

Mohiuddin points out that although clinically dead people are a useful model for assessing the viability of xenotransplantation in living people, that usefulness is limited, because once a person’s brain ceases activity, they undergo hormonal changes. And it isn’t yet clear how long someone with no cognitive function can be maintained on a ventilator and with a donated pig organ, he says. The longest documented case was two months, which involved a pig-kidney transplant.

Shaked also questions whether surgery is necessary for pig livers to be useful to humans. Unlike the heart, which essentially functions as a pump, the liver performs many complex tasks, which makes it particularly difficult to transplant. A pig liver can carry out the liver’s detoxifying and waste-disposal role, but Shaked does not anticipate that it will be able to produce the broad array of proteins required for the human liver’s other functions.

This means that whereas heart and kidney xenotransplants have been touted as possible long-term organ replacements, liver xenotransplants are seen mainly as a short-term fix for people with liver failure. They could enable a person’s existing liver to regenerate, for example after damage caused by alcohol or drug consumption, or could buy time while waiting for a human liver donor.

As a result, Shaked and his team chose to avoid operating: they hooked up an external pig liver to the recipient using blood-carrying tubes. But Dou says his team’s goal is organ replacement. He adds that working in a person allows the researchers to collect a lot more data, including information on immunology and physiological changes.

Yang says she hopes the team will publish detailed insights about the transplantation in peer-reviewed publications, to help determine which approach is more feasible.

In the meantime, Shaked hopes to exchange notes with the Chinese team. “I’d love to hear more about what they did. It’s fantastic.”

3) Mathematician who tamed randomness wins Abel Prize: By Davide Castelvecchi

Michel Talagrand laid mathematical groundwork that has allowed others to tackle problems involving random processes. A mathematician who developed formulas to make random processes more predictable and helped to solve an iconic model of complex phenomena has won the 2024 Abel Prize, one of the field’s most coveted awards. Michel Talagrand received the prize for his “contributions to probability theory and functional analysis, with outstanding applications in mathematical physics and statistics”, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in Oslo announced on 20 March.

Assaf Naor, a mathematician at Princeton University in New Jersey, says it is difficult to overestimate the impact of Talagrand’s work. “There are papers posted maybe on a daily basis where the punchline is ‘now we use Talagrand’s inequalities’,” he says.

Talagrand’s reaction on hearing the news was incredulity. “There was a total blank in my mind for at least four seconds,” he says. “If I had been told an alien ship had landed in front of the White House, I would not have been more surprised.”

The Abel Prize was modelled after the Nobel Prizes — which do not include mathematics — and was first awarded in 2003. The recipient wins a sum of 7.5 million Norwegian kroner (US$700,000).

‘Like a piece of art’

Talagrand specializes in the theory of probability and stochastic processes, which are mathematical models of phenomena governed by randomness. A typical example is a river’s water level, which is highly variable and is affected by many independent factors, including rain, wind and temperature, Talagrand says. His proudest achievement was his inequalities, a set of formulas that poses limits to the swings in stochastic processes. His formulas express how the contributions of many factors often cancel each other out — making the overall result less variable, not more.

“It’s like a piece of art,” says Abel-committee chair Helge Holden, a mathematician at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. “The magic here is to find a good estimate, not just a rough estimate.”Thanks to Talagrand’s techniques, “many things that seem complicated and random turn out to be not so random”, says Naor. His estimates are extremely powerful, for example for studying problems such as optimizing the route of a delivery truck. Finding a perfect solution would require an exorbitant amount of computation, so computer scientists can instead calculate the lengths of a limited number of random candidate routes and then take the average — and Talagrand’s inequalities ensure that the result is close to optimal.

Talagrand also completed the solution to a problem posed by theoretical physicist Giorgio Parisi — work that ultimately helped Parisi to earn a Nobel Prize in Physics in 2021. In 1979, Parisi, now at the University of Rome, proposed a complete solution for the structure of a spin glass — an abstracted model of a material in which the magnetization of each atom tends to flip up or down depending on those of its neighbours.

Parisi’s arguments were rooted in his powerful intuition in physics, and followed steps that “mathematicians would consider as sorcery”, Talagrand says, such as taking n copies of a system — with n being a negative number. Many researchers doubted that Parisi’s proof could be made mathematically rigorous. But in the early 2000s, the problem was completely solved in two separate works, one by Talagrand2 and an earlier one by Francesco Guerra3, a mathematical physicist who is also at the University of Rome.

Finding motivation

Talagrand’s journey to becoming a top researcher was unconventional. Born in Béziers, France, in 1952, he lost vision in his right eye at age five because of a genetic predisposition to detachment of the retina. Although while growing up in Lyon he was a voracious reader of popular science magazines, he struggled at school, particularly with the complex rules of French spelling. “I never really made peace with orthography,” he told an interviewer in 2019.

His turning point came at age 15, when he received emergency treatment for another retinal detachment, this time in his left eye. He had to miss almost an entire year of school. The terrifying experience of nearly losing his sight — and his father’s efforts to keep his mind busy while his eyes were bandaged — gave Talagrand a renewed focus. He became a highly motivated student after his recovery, and began to excel in national maths competitions.Still, Talagrand did not follow the typical path of gifted French students, which includes two years of preparatory school followed by a national admission competition for highly selective grandes écoles such as the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Instead, he studied at the University of Lyon, France, and then went on to work as a full-time researcher at the national research agency CNRS, first in Lyon and later in Paris, where he spent more than a decade in an entry-level job. Apart from a brief stint in Canada, followed by a trip to the United States where he met his wife, he worked at the CNRS until his retirement.

Talagrand loves to challenge other mathematicians to solve problems that he has come up with — offering cash to those who do — and he keeps a list of those problems on his website. Some have been solved, leading to publications in major maths journals. The prizes come with some conditions: “I will award the prizes below as long as I am not too senile to understand the proofs I receive. If I can’t understand them, I will not pay.”

4) Cutting-edge CAR-T cancer therapy is now made in India — at one-tenth the cost: By Smriti Mallapaty

The treatment, called NexCAR19, raises hopes that this transformative class of medicine will become more readily available in low- and middle-income countries.A small Indian biotechnology company is producing a home-grown version of a cutting-edge cancer treatment known as chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy that was pioneered in the United States. CAR-T therapies are used mainly to treat blood cancers and have burgeoned in the past few years. The Indian CAR-T therapy costs one-tenth that of comparable commercial products available globally.

A single treatment of NexCAR19, manufactured by Mumbai-based ImmunoACT, costs between US$30,000 and $40,000. The first CAR-T therapy was approved in the United States in 2017, and commercial CAR-T therapies currently cost between $370,000 and $530,000, not including hospital fees and drugs to treat side effects. These treatments have also shown promise in treating autoimmune diseases and brain cancer.

India’s drug regulator approved NexCAR19 for therapeutic use in India in October. By December, ImmunoACT was administering the therapy to paying patients, and it is now treating some two-dozen people a month in hospitals across the country.

“It’s a dream come true,” says Alka Dwivedi, an immunologist who helped to develop NexCAR19 and is now at the US National Cancer Institute (NCI) in Bethesda, Maryland. Her voice becomes tender as she describes seeing the first patient’s cancer go into remission. These are people for whom all other treatments have failed, says Dwivedi. “They are getting cured.”

“It’s very positive news,” says Renato Cunha, a haematologist at the Grupo Oncoclínicas in São Paulo, Brazil. He says the Indian product could pave the way for making advanced cellular therapies accessible to other low- and middle-income countries. “Hope is the word that comes to mind.”

The product is also a reality check for researchers in high-income countries, says Terry Fry, an immunologist and paediatric oncologist at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Denver, who has advised the researchers involved in setting up ImmunoACT. “It lights a little fire under all of us to look at the cost of making CAR-T cells, even in places like the United States.”

Tremendous need

CAR-T therapy involves taking someone’s blood and isolating immune components known as T cells. These are genetically modified in the laboratory to express a receptor, known as a CAR, on their surface. This helps the immune cells to find and kill cancer cells. The engineered cells are then mass-produced and infused back into the patient, in whom they proliferate and get to work.Data on demand for these therapies in India are limited, but one study looking at a specific form of leukaemia found that up to 15 people in 100,000 are diagnosed with the disease, half of whom relapse within two years of receiving treatment, such as chemotherapy, and who subsequently choose palliative care1. There is a “tremendous patient need”, says Nirali Shah, a paediatric oncologist at the NCI, who is also an academic collaborator of the researchers at ImmunoACT.

NexCAR19 is similar to its US counterparts, yet distinct in key ways. Like four of the six CAR-T therapies approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), it is designed to target CD19, a marker found on B-cell cancers2. However, in existing commercial therapies, the antibody fragment at the end of a CAR is typically from mice, which limits its durability because the immune system recognizes it as foreign and eventually eliminates it. Therefore, in NexCAR19, Dwivedi and her colleagues added human proteins to the mouse antibody tips.

Lab studies showed that the ‘humanized’ CAR had comparable antitumour activity to a mouse-derived one and induced the production of lower levels of proteins called cytokines2. This is important, because some people with cancer who receive CAR-T therapy experience an extreme inflammatory reaction known as cytokine-release syndrome, which can be life-threatening.

Trial data

Early-stage clinical trials for NexCAR19 in adults with different forms of lymphoma and leukaemia, showed that in 19 of the 33 people who received the therapy, the tumours had completely disappeared at the one-month follow-up3. The tumours in another four people had shrunk by half — achieving an overall response rate of 70%. Trial participants will be followed for at least five years.

“Whether this will hold or not is something only time will tell,” says Hasmukh Jain, a medical oncologist at Tata Memorial Centre in Mumbai, who led the trials.

Natasha Kekre, a haematologist at the Ottawa Hospital, points out that the results are based on a small number of participants with a range of blood cancers, which makes it difficult to assess the treatment’s efficacy for specific cancers.

Only two of the participants experienced more-severe forms of cytokine-release syndrome, and none had neurotoxicities, another common but temporary side effect of CAR-T therapy.

The safety profile is better than that of some of the FDA-approved CAR-T treatments, says Kekre. This could be related to the product, as well as to years of the scientific and medical community learning how to better care for patients, she says.

Humanizing the CAR probably contributed to the therapy’s positive safety profile, says Rahul Purwar, an immunologist at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, and founder of ImmunoACT. But others say that link has yet to be established.

Fry says the setting and type of patient treated in India could also affect the results. “The toxicity profile of CAR-T cells is driven by a lot of other patient factors.”Slashing costs

Although the treatment’s price tag is still high for many Indians, whose annual gross national income per capita is less than $2,500, NexCAR19’s cost offers hope that CAR-T therapy can be made more cheaply in other countries and contexts. To slash costs, the team developed, tested and manufactured the product entirely in India, where labour is cheaper than in high-income countries.

To introduce CARs to T cells, researchers typically use lentiviruses, which are expensive. Purchasing enough lentiviral vector for a trial of 50 people can cost up to US$800,000 in the United States, says Steven Highfill, an immunologist at the US National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Bethesda, who has advised the Indian team. Scientists at ImmunoACT make this gene-delivery vehicle themselves.

The Indian team also found a cheaper way to mass-produce the engineered cells, avoiding the need for expensive automated machinery, says Highfill.

Patients’ costs are further reduced by the therapy’s improved safety profile compared with some of the other FDA-approved products, Purwar says. This meant that most patients did not need to spend time in intensive-care units.

Purwar hopes to further cut costs, including by scaling up production. ImmunoACT is planning to export the therapy to Mexico, and to develop new products, including a treatment for another form of blood cancer known as multiple myeloma.

But ImmunoACT faces competition. Several other Indian companies have launched local CAR-T trials, including Immuneel Therapeutics in Bengaluru, which has licensed technology developed by Spanish academics.

5) Largest-ever map of universe's active supermassive black holes released:by Thomas Sumner, Simons Foundation

Astronomers have charted the largest-ever volume of the universe with a new map of active supermassive black holes living at the centers of galaxies. Called quasars, the gas-gobbling black holes are, ironically, some of the universe's brightest objects.The new map logs the location of about 1.3 million quasars in space and time, the furthest of which shone bright when the universe was only 1.5 billion years old. (For comparison, the universe is now 13.7 billion years old.)

"This quasar catalog is different from all previous catalogs in that it gives us a three-dimensional map of the largest-ever volume of the universe," says map co-creator David Hogg, a senior research scientist at the Flatiron Institute's Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York City and a professor of physics and data science at New York University. "It isn't the catalog with the most quasars, and it isn't the catalog with the best-quality measurements of quasars, but it is the catalog with the largest total volume of the universe mapped."

Hogg and his colleagues present the map in a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal. The paper's lead author, Kate Storey-Fisher, is a postdoctoral researcher at the Donostia International Physics Center in Spain.

The scientists built the new map using data from the European Space Agency's Gaia space telescope. While Gaia's main objective is to map the stars in our galaxy, it also inadvertently spots objects outside the Milky Way, such as quasars and other galaxies, as it scans the sky.

"We were able to make measurements of how matter clusters together in the early universe that are as precise as some of those from major international survey projects—which is quite remarkable given that we got our data as a 'bonus' from the Milky Way–focused Gaia project," Storey-Fisher says.Quasars are powered by supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies and can be hundreds of times as bright as an entire galaxy. As the black hole's gravitational pull spins up nearby gas, the process generates an extremely bright disk and sometimes jets of light that telescopes can observe.

The galaxies that quasars inhabit are surrounded by massive halos of invisible material called dark matter. By studying quasars, astronomers can learn more about dark matter, such as how much it clumps together.

Astronomers can also use the locations of distant quasars and their host galaxies to better understand how the cosmos expanded over time. For example, scientists have already compared the new quasar map with the oldest light in our cosmos, the cosmic microwave background. As this light travels to us, it is bent by the intervening web of dark matter—the same web mapped out by the quasars. By comparing the two, scientists can measure how strongly matter clumps together.

"It has been very exciting to see this catalog spurring so much new science," Storey-Fisher says. "Researchers around the world are using the quasar map to measure everything from the initial density fluctuations that seeded the cosmic web to the distribution of cosmic voids to the motion of our solar system through the universe."

The team used data from Gaia's third data release, which contained 6.6 million quasar candidates, and data from NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. By combining the datasets, the team removed contaminants such as stars and galaxies from Gaia's original dataset and more precisely pinpointed the distances to the quasars.

The team also created a map showing where dust, stars, and other nuisances are expected to block our view of certain quasars, which is critical for interpreting the quasar map.

"This quasar catalog is a great example of how productive astronomical projects are," says Hogg. "Gaia was designed to measure stars in our own galaxy, but it also found millions of quasars at the same time, which give us a map of the entire universe."

6) Tanks of the triassic: New crocodile ancestor identified:by University of Texas at Austin

Dinosaurs get all the glory. But aetosaurs, a heavily armored cousin of modern crocodiles, ruled the world before dinosaurs did. These tanks of the Triassic came in a variety of shapes and sizes before going extinct around 200 million years ago. Today, their fossils are found on every continent except Antarctica and Australia.Scientists use the bony plates that make up aetosaur armor to identify different species and usually don't have many fossil skeletons to work with. But a new study led by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin centers on an aetosaur suit of armor that has most of its major parts intact.

The suit—called a carapace—is about 70% complete and covers each major region of the body.

The paper is published in The Anatomical Record.

"We have elements from the back of the neck and shoulder region all the way to the tip of the tail," said William Reyes, a doctoral student at the UT Jackson School of Geosciences who led the research. "Usually, you find very limited material."

Reyes and his collaborators used the armor to identify the specimen as a new aetosaur species—which they named Garzapelta muelleri. The name "Garza" recognizes Garza County in northwest Texas, where the aetosaur was found, and "pelta" is Latin for shield, a nod to aetosaur's heavily fortified body. The species name "muelleri" honors the paleontologist who originally discovered it, Bill Mueller.Garzapelta lived about 215 million years ago and resembled a modern American crocodile—but with much more armor.

"Take a crocodile from modern day, and turn it into an armadillo," said Reyes.

The bony plates that covered Garzapelta and other aetosaurs are called osteoderms. They were embedded directly in the skin and formed a suit of armor by fitting together like a mosaic. In addition to having a body covered in bony plates, Garzapelta's sides were flanked by curved spikes that would have offered another layer of protection from predators. Although crocodiles today are carnivores, scientists think that aetosaurs were primarily omnivorous.

The spikes on Garzapelta are very similar to those found in another aetosaur species, but surprisingly, researchers found that the two species are only distantly related. The similarities, they discovered, are an example of convergent evolution, the independent evolution of similar traits in different species. The development of flight in insects, birds, mammals and now-extinct pterosaurs is a classic example of this phenomenon.

According to Reyes, an array of unique features on Garzapelta's plates clearly marked it as a new species. They range from how the plates fit together to unique bumps and ridges on the bones. However, figuring out where Garzapelta fit into the larger aetosaur family tree was more of challenge. Depending on which portion of the armor the researchers emphasized in their analysis, Garzapelta would end up in very different places. Armor that ran down its back resembled armor from one species, while its midsection spikes resembled armor from another.Once the researchers determined that the spikes evolved independently, they were able to work out where Garzapelta fit best among other aetosaur species. Nevertheless, Reyes said the research shows how convergent evolution can complicate things.

"Convergence of the osteoderms across distantly related aetosaurs has been noted before, but the carapace of Garzapelta muelleri is the best example of it and shows to what extent it can happen and the problems it causes in our phylogenetic analyses," Reyes said.

Garzapelta is part of the Texas Tech University fossil collections. It spent most of the past 30 years on a shelf before Reyes encountered it during a visit. Bill Parker, an aetosaur expert and park paleontologist at Petrified Forest National Park who was not part of the research, said that university and museum collections are a critical part of making this type of research possible.

"These specimens weren't just dug in the field yesterday," he said. "They've been sitting in the museum for decades and it just takes someone like Will to come along and finally decide to study them and make them come to life."

In addition to different species having different armor, it's possible that an animal's age or sex could also affect armor appearance. Reyes is currently exploring these questions by studying aetosaur fossils in the Jackson School's collection, most of which were found during the 1940s as part of excavations done by the Works Progress Administration.

The study co-authors are Jeffrey Martz, an associate professor at the University of Houston-Downtown, and Bryan Small, a research associate at the Museum of Texas Tech University.

1) Arvind Kejriwal Arrest News LIVE Updates: INDIA bloc to protest against ‘alleged misuse of central agencies’ on March 31

Vehicles carrying Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal enters ED office after the Rouse Avenue court sends him in ED custody till 28th March at Moti Lal Nehru Marg in New Delhi, India, on Friday, March 22,

Arvind Kejriwal Arrest : A Delhi court remanded Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal to six-day custody of the Enforcement Directorate (ED) till March 28 in an excise policy-related money laundering case. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal has been remanded to the custody of the Enforcement Directorate (ED) for six days till March 28. This was despite the Enforcement Directorate seeking a 10-day remand of Kejriwal. The Delhi CM was arrested in connection with a money laundering case linked to the Delhi government's Excise Policy. He was presented before a Delhi court on Friday. Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leaders will gherao Prime Minister Narendra Modi's residence on March 26 to protest against Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal's arrest, said AAP leader Gopal Rai. Meanwhile, AAP leaders have protested the arrest. Several AAP leaders were detailed on Friday.

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal is arrested in the excise policy case

Delhi CM and AAP's national convenor Arvind Kejriwal was arrested in connection with the excise policy case. His arrest poses several challenges to the Delhi government and party leadership ahead of the Lok Sabha elections this year and assembly elections in the Union Territory in 2025.The arrest of Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal has prompted many to demand his resignation from the post. Kejriwal is also the Aam Aadmi Party's (AAP) national convenor. His arrest in connection with the money laundering case linked to the excise policy has already raised questions about the party's next leadership. Now, if he steps down as the chief minister, the crisis will grip Delhi's governance as well. Although AAP leaders say that there will be "no problems in running the (Delhi) government from jail," legal experts beg to differ.

Moreover, the Lok Sabha elections 2024 are around the corner. The AAP will be contesting the polls in alliance with the Congress in Delhi, Haryana, Gujarat, Chandigarh and Goa. Kejriwal's party is also part of the Opposition's INDIA bloc.

2) 2024 Lok Sabha elections to be held in 7 phases from April 19, results on June 4

Chief election commissioner Rajiv Kumar addresses the press conference announcing the dates for the Lok Sabha polls, which will be held in 7 phases from 19th April to 1st June, in New Delhi on Saturday.

Assembly elections for Andhra Pradesh, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh and Odisha will also be simultaneously held along with the General Elections

Lok Sabha Election 2024 Highlights: The Election Commission of India announced on Saturday that Lok Sabha elections will be held in 7 phases. Counting for all elections, including by-elections, assembly elections, and general elections, is slated for June 4. The current government's term is ending on June 16. Lok Sabha elections full schedule

• Phase 1- April 19, 2024

• Phase 2- 26 April 2024

• Phase 3-7 May 2024

• Phase 4 - 13 May 2024

• Phase 5 - 20 May 2024

• Phase 6 - 25 May 2024

• Phase 7 - 1 June 2024

• Counting on June 4

2024 Lok Sabha polls: Check full schedule

How many voters for Lok Sabha elections in India?

According to CEC Rajiv Kumar, there are 96.8 crore people are eligible to cast a vote in the upcoming polls at over 12 lakh polling stations.

What was the result of 2019 Lok Sabha elections?

In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the ruling Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) won 303 seats while Congress got 52 seats.

The BJP-led NDA has expressed confidence for the upcoming polls as well, hoping to win over 400 seats. While Congress boasts of giving a spirited fight.Along with announcing Lok Sabha elections that will be held in seven phases beginning from April 19, Chief Election Commissioner Rajiv Kumar also announced the schedule of Assembly polls in four states - Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim, and Odisha.

Assembly elections will be held in Andhra Pradesh on May 13, in Arunachal Pradesh and Sikkim on April 19.

Bypolls on 26 Assembly seats will also be held along with the Lok Sabha polls. Nearly 96.8 crore people are eligible to cast their votes in the upcoming polls at over 12 lakh polling stations.

3) Senior Advocate Prashant Bhushan calls for SIT probe into Electoral Bond controversy

Senior Advocate Prashant Bhushan

Activist lawyer Prashant Bhushan, who was lead counsel in the Electoral Bond case in the Supreme Court, on Thursday demanded an independent probe by Special Investigation Team (SIT) to look into the finer details of the political funding and also find if there was a quid-pro-quo between the corporate and political parties.

Addressing a press conference here a day after the Election Commission made public the Electoral Bond data with alphanumeric codes and bond numbers in two extensive lists – one that of donors and the other of the name of the parties encashing them, Bhushan said, “Electoral Bond is the largest scam of Independent India, which even bigger than 2G and coal scams. In the case of 2G and coal scams there were no money trails. But in the present case there is a certain money trail.” To empirically establish the money trail and also the suspected quid-pro-quo between the corporate and the political parties, “there should be an independent probe by an SIT, composed of experts”.  He said, “Only such an investigation can substantially  establish our legitimate doubt about companies paying to political parties to get their jobs done in terms of policy, contract and otherwise.”     

Bhshan said, “After doing a preliminary analysis of the data now available in public domain, it has been revealed that BJP received Rs 1,751 crore in donation through electoral bonds from various companies and in turn those companies got government contracts worth Rs 62,000 crore.”

He also alleged that the total number of firms, which were raided and in turn they donated to the BJP, is 104 and out of which 30 are identified as shell companies. Further sharing data during the press conference Bhushan said, “In at least 49 cases, Rs 62,000 crore in postpaid/project approval were given by the central or BJP state governments, for which Rs 580 crore in kickbacks (in the form of electoral bonds) were given to the BJP within three months after approval/contract.”

“It is ironic that the ED, which has been involved in the extortion of money from corporates through electoral bonds for its BJP bosses & whose officers must be investigated and prosecuted, has arrested Kejriwal last night without a shred of documentary evidence against him, on the eve of elections. Shocking & condemnable!,” Bhushan said in one of his ‘X’ posts after the press conference.

BJP mopped up 84% of electoral bonds during 2019 general elections

Congress was a distant second with just under 8%, followed by TMC at 2.5% Although the data revealed by State Bank of India on Thursday does not throw much light on the pattern of fund-raising by parties before April 2019, it still gives some insight into the Bharatiya Janata Party's extraordinary ability to raise funds in times of need.

The party mopped up a whopping 84% of all funds that flowed in via bonds as the 2019 elections were going on, going by the data revealed by SBI.

Although the electoral window of April-May 2019 covered only around 2.8% of the period for which data is available, going by the numbers, it accounted for nearly 20% of the total inflows.

This was largely because parties tend to be short of cash during elections and aggressively seek funding from their well-wishers during such periods.

Going by the numbers, there was no doubt about who the money-men were betting on.

Of the total Rs 2,115 crore shown to have come in during the April-May window, Rs 1,772 crore flowed into the coffers of BJP, translating to a share of 83.77%.

The main opposition, Indian National Congress, was a far second at a mere 7.97%, or Rs 169 crore.

At third place was Trinamool Congress with 2.45% of the total proceeds, or Rs 52 crre, followed by Bharat Rashtra Samithi at 1.76%.

Shiv Sena was at No.5 with 0.73%, followed by AIADMK and Samajwadi Party with just above 0.5% each.

Of this Rs 2115 crore, donor data is available only for Rs 1,492 crore, because donor data has been made available only from April 12, even though the number capture nearly all of the inflows during the April-May electoral bonds window.

Unlike other financial instruments, SBI does not sell electoral bonds all through the year. Instead, it opens up the so-called windows -- generally 30-40 days long -- once every two months or so for companies to donate to their favorite parties.

The remaining 623 crore were transferred by companies before April 12, but were claimed by parties on or after April 12.

Interestingly, BJP's share fell to around 50% for the five-year period of 2019-24 as other parties started utilizing the bonds system effectively.

Interestingly, it remains to be seen what happens to parties in 2024 election season, given that the Supreme Court has turned off the electoral bonds pipe.

BJP      1772     83.77%

INC       169       7.97%

TMC     52         2.45%

BRS     37         1.76%

SHIVSENA       15         0.73%

AIADMK           12         0.57%

SP        11         0.51%

DMK     9          0.43%

YSRCP 8          0.39%

TDP      7          0.35%

SAD     7          0.32%

NCP     4          0.17%

JDU (NITISH)    3          0.14%

Construction firm behind Silkyara tunnel donated Rs 55 crore in electoral bonds to BJP

A total of 41 workers were trapped after a portion of the under-construction tunnel collapsed on November 12, 2023. The workers were rescued on November 28.  Hyderabad-based Navayuga Engineering Company Ltd (NEC), which is constructing the Silkyara-Barkot tunnel in Uttarakhand, a portion of which collapsed last year, purchased Rs 55 crore worth of electoral bonds and donated the entire amount to the BJP, as per data released by the Election Commission.

A total of 41 workers were trapped after a portion of the under-construction tunnel collapsed on November 12, 2023. The workers were rescued on November 28.

The Silkyara-Barkot tunnel project -- cleared by the cabinet committee on economic affairs in 2018 -- was to be completed in 2022, but its deadline NEC purchased 55 electoral bonds of Rs 1 crore each between April 19, 2019 and October 10, 2022.

Navayuga Engineering, the flagship company of the Navayuga Group, is an engineering and core infrastructure company, according to information posted on the company's website.

The company said it has constructed the Dhola-Sadia Bridge -- the country's longest river bridge -- over the Brahmaputra river, spanning a total of 9.15 km.

NEC also claimed that it was entrusted with the responsibility of constructing the Polavaram Project by the Andhra Pradesh government.

As per the NEC's website, it is responsible for many iconic projects, including bridges over the Ganga, the Quazigund to Banihal Highway project to ensure all-weather connectivity to north Kashmir through Pir Panjal Pas, a road prone to closure due to severe weather conditions.

The Silkyara-Barkot tunnel is a single-tube tunnel divided into two inter-connected corridors by a partition wall. Each inter-connector corridor can work as an escape passage for the other.

The 4.5 km tunnel project in Uttarakhand, which is part of the Centre's 900 km Char Dham Yatra All Weather Road, aims to improve connectivity to the four pilgrimage sites.

A query sent to Navayuga Engineering did not elicit any response.

The electoral bond scheme was announced by then Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in his Budget speech of 2017-18, pitching it as an alternative to cash donations made to political parties as part of efforts to bring transparency to political funding.

Under the scheme, the name of the donor is known only to banks. Electoral bonds are encashed by an eligible political party only through a bank account with the authorised bank.However, the Supreme Court in February directed State Bank of India, which was the designated lender for issuing these bonds, to disclose details of each electoral bond encashed by political parties.While directing SBI, the Supreme Court also annulled the electoral bonds scheme for political funding, saying it violates the constitutional right to freedom of speech and expression and the right to information.

4) INDIA bloc team seeks intervention of EC over misuse of Central agencies

The parties suggested that immediate action should be taken including the launch of investigations against individuals and officers who have misused their offices to harass the leaders of the opposition. A day after the arrest of Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, a nine-member delegation of the INDIA bloc approached the Election Commission of India seeking urgent intervention into the ‘blatant’ use of central agencies against the Opposition.

The delegation included Congress MPs K C Venugopal and Abhishek Singhvi, TMC MPs Derek O’Brien and Nadimul Haque, AAP MP Sandeep Pathak, CPM leader Sitaram Yechury and DMK’s P Wilson, among others.

In its memorandum, the parties said that to ensure a level playing field, the ECI must set up a committee and issue a circular ensuring that any raids, investigations, and arrests are first vetted and approved by it.

The parties suggested that immediate action should be taken including the launch of investigations against individuals and officers who have misused their offices to harass the leaders of the opposition.

“It is our submission that free and fair elections are not possible in an atmosphere of threats, and extortion. The Commission must take steps to halt this brazen misuse of the official machinery. This electoral process will have lost all sanctity if the Commission is unable to ensure a level playing field,” it said.

Congress leader Abhishek Singhvi said that representatives from most of the opposition parties have met the EC. “This isn’t about an individual or any party but it relates to the basic structure of the constitution. When a level playing field is needed for election and you do not let the field by misusing agencies, it impacts free and fair elections and ultimately democracy. We asked the EC to interfere. In the history of 75 years of independent India, the first time a sitting CM has been arrested.”

“It is a move that is deliberately designed to demoralize the parties and the opposition at large. The arrests are meant to send a message that the ruling regime will not countenance any real opposition to its electoral ambitions,” read the memorandum.

The parties said that there is a clear pattern of the ruling regime trying to abuse power, and destroy the level playing field for other political parties contesting the Lok Sabha elections. Such actions are in direct violation of the instructions of the EC, provisions of the Representation of People Act, 1951, and provisions of the Indian Penal Code, 1860, it pointed out.

CPI-M general secretary Sitaram Yechury said, “The model code of conduct is in force, despite that such actions are being taken. Without a level playing field, democracy is nothing.”

5) Congress party accuses government of account freezing before India election

Congress party's top leaders Sonia Gandhi, Mallikarjun Kharge and Rahul Gandhi addressed a press conference on Thursday

The main opposition party says Modi government has ‘crippled’ it before the upcoming election by freezing bank accounts in an income tax case. The Congress party, India’s main opposition political group, has accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government of stifling democracy and “crippling” the party by freezing its bank accounts in a tax dispute ahead of the general election.

India will hold a six-week election starting next month, with the Congress-led alliance pitted against Modi’s heavily funded Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Former Congress chief Rahul Gandhi on Thursday told reporters in New Delhi the party is unable to campaign properly with its accounts frozen by the income tax department.

“Our entire financial identity has been erased,” said Gandhi, 53, the scion of the family that dominated Indian politics for decades after independence.

“We have no money to campaign, we cannot support our candidates. Our ability to fight elections has been damaged.” A portion of the Congress’s bank accounts were frozen last month pending a tax case that dates back to 2018-19. Earlier this month, a tax tribunal dismissed its appeal to pause the recovery of 1.35bn rupees ($16.32m) in income tax from its bank accounts. Congress treasurer Ajay Maken said in a statement that tax authorities imposed a 2.1bn rupee ($25m) lien on February 13, “virtually sealed” its bank accounts, and then confiscated 1.1bn rupees ($14m).

The Congress claims the tax department’s sanctions are politically motivated, to hobble it from mounting a challenge to Modi’s BJP.

“Last week, we received another notice from the tax authorities that dates back to our filings from 1995-96,” Gandhi said. “This is a criminal action on the Congress party done by the prime minister and the home minister. The idea that India is a democracy is a lie. There is no democracy in India today.”

Earlier on Thursday, his mother and former Congress chief Sonia Gandhi also made a rare public appearance, saying the tax penalty was “part of the systemic efforts to cripple” the party. The BJP rejected the allegations, saying the Congress’s bank accounts were partially frozen because it had failed to file an income tax return for cash donations it received in 2017-18 and had therefore lost the tax exemption available to political parties.

BJP president Jagat Prakash Nadda said the Congress was making the accusations against Indian democracy and institutions because it feared an “historic defeat” in the election.

India’s Supreme Court is scheduled to take up the Congress party’s complaint early next month after it was rejected by tax appeal authorities, BJP spokesman Ravi Shankar Prasad told reporters.

According to the latest official financial disclosures to the Election Commission of India, the BJP’s funds are nearly 10 times that of Congress. The gulf dramatically widened after Modi’s government introduced contentious electoral bonds in 2017, allowing unlimited anonymous donations.

Last month, the Supreme Court outlawed the scheme as unconstitutional and asked for donor and receiver details to be made public. Released details showed the BJP was by far the single largest beneficiary, with just under half of all donations, totalling about $730m.

Voting in India, the world’s largest democracy, will stretch over seven phases from April 19 to June 1, with different states voting at different times. Results are to be announced on June 4.

Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge said the lack of funds had made the party “helpless” ahead of the election.“There is no level playing field,” he said.

6) BJP decides to go solo in Odisha as alliance talks with BJD fail

Political pundits feel that a post-poll alliance between the two parties cannot be ruled out in case the BJP requires the BJD’s support at the Centre, considering the proximity between Prime Minister Modi and Chief Minister Patnaik

BJD was reportedly not willing to concede seats in the Assembly elections, a post-poll alliance is not ruled out Odisha’s ruling Biju Janata Dal and principal opposition Bharatiya Janata Party will contest the forthcoming simultaneous Lok Sabha and Assembly elections in the State separately, scotching speculations about a possible pre-poll alliance between the two erstwhile allies. The confirmation to this effect came through a message on social media post by State BJP President Manmohan Samal that their party will contest all 21 Lok Sabha seats and 147 Assembly seats alone. His announcement was welcomed by several senior leaders of the party in the State.

Amid alliance talks during the past few weeks, the BJD had been taking forward its poll preparedness for each Lok Sabha constituency in separate consultations with Chief Minister and party president Naveen Patnaik. The BJD had completed stocktaking of as many as 10 Lok Sabha constituencies and the 70 Assembly seats under them until Friday (March 22). Samal’s announcement came a day after a delegation of the State unit of the BJP approached the Chief Electoral Officer of the State, seeking the removal of hoardings of government welfare schemes with photographs of the Chief Minister.

In his post, Samal lamented that many welfare schemes of the Modi government were not reaching the grass-roots level in the State. “We realise that wherever there are double-engine governments in the country, there has been accelerated implementation of development and pro-poor welfare schemes, and the States have progressed in every sector,” he said.

The State BJP president, however, expressed gratitude to Patnaik for his party’s support to the Modi government at the Centre on many issues of national importance over the past 10 years.

The talks about an alliance between the two parties had started after Prime Minister Narendra Modi refrained from attacking the BJD government during his two recent visits to Odisha (February 3 and March 5). Modi had also addressed Patnaik as the “popular Chief Minister” at his second meeting.

Talks failed

According to sources, the alliance talks failed when the BJD did not agree to concede more than one-fourth of Assembly seats to the BJP despite agreeing to leave two-thirds of Lok Sabha seats to the BJP. The BJD’s argument was that they had been winning more than three-fourths of Assembly seats in the last three elections after the alliance between the two parties had ended ahead of the 2009 polls. The regional party had also swept last the Zilla Parishad and urban local body elections in the State.

Political pundits feel that a post-poll alliance between the two parties cannot be ruled out in case the BJP requires the BJD’s support at the Centre, considering the proximity between Prime Minister Modi and Chief Minister Patnaik.This had been evident since the regional party helped Union Minister Ashwini Vaisnhaw get elected to the Rajya Sabha from Odisha after the 2019 elections and again in February this year.

 

 1) Aryna Sabalenka wins Miami Open match 4 days after ex-partner's death

Aryna Sabalenka, of Belarus, waves after defeating Paula Badosa, of Spain, at the Miami Open tennis tournament

Sabalenka has asked for privacy for herself and the family of Konstantin Koltsov, the 42-year-old Belarusian who died in Miami on Monday. Playing four days after the death of a former hockey player she dated, Aryna Sabalenka beat Paula Badosa 6-4, 6-3 on Friday in the second round of the rain-soaked Miami Open. Sabalenka has asked for privacy for herself and the family of Konstantin Koltsov, the 42-year-old Belarusian who died in Miami on Monday. Miami-Dade Police said it was an apparent suicide and no foul play was suspected.

The second-ranked Sabalenka is a 25-year-old also from Belarus who won the Australian Open in January for her second consecutive title at Melbourne Park. As one of the 32 seeded players, Sabalenka received a first-round bye.

Rain delayed the start of the day's play by six hours, then more rain wiped out the rest of the scheduled play early in the evening. Wind also was a factor.

In one of the first matches completed, U.S. Open champion Coco Gauff moved on to the third round, beating Nadia Podoroska 6-1, 6-2. Gauff is ranked No. 3. Fourth-ranked Elena Rybakina outlasted Elena Rybakina 3-6, 7-5, 6-4. Also, Emma Navarro beat Storm Hunter 6-4, 6-3, and Ekaterina Alexandrova topped Donna Vekic 6-3, 6-4.

In men’s play, third-ranked Jannik Sinner led Andrea Vavassori 3-2 when the all-Italian match was suspended for the day. Earlier, Tomas Machac beat sixth-ranked Andrey Rublev 6-4, 6-4, and Ugo Humbert edged Botic Van de Zandschulp 6-4, 6-3.

2) Lighter season, new runup: Sreeshankar’s formula for Paris success

Murali Sreeshankar

Father and coach S Murali says they are planning to try a running start instead of a static one keeping in mind one big jump in Paris Murali Sreeshankar was on travel mode for most of last season. He was crisscrossing continents trying to keep up with the busy schedule of competition and training he had planned for himself. That meant frequent change of time zones, acclimatising to different conditions and quickly adapting to the environment around him.

In seven months starting from April, he competed in 10 events and had training stints in Texas Tech University in the US and then in Greece. Despite the rigorous schedule, Sreeshankar came up with some noteworthy performances, be it leaping to his personal best of 8.41m in Bhubaneshwar Inter-State Championships to winning silver at the Asian Athletics Championships (8.37m) and at the Asian Games (8.19m). By the end of the season, Sreeshankar was drained.

This season Sreeshankar has decided to keep himself light and focus all his energy towards the Paris Olympics. He will start the season late and there will be less travel and competition.

"We are starting a little late this year. He had a minor knee injury last season and he had to compete in all the events with it. So, he took a rest and did his rehab. We have finished our general preparation and now we will begin our technical training," said Sreeshankar’s father and coach S Murali. Sreeshankar has spent the off season at his hometown in Palakkad and will continue his training there before he opens his season at the Shanghai Diamond League on April 27. He will then compete in Doha Diamond League on May 10 and after that he will train in Cyprus for around 40 days before coming back for the Inter-state competition from June 27-30. In between, he is likely to take part in one or two competitions in Europe.

"Last year we started early. There was a lot of competition and travelling and he was tired after the Asian Games. This year he will have to peak only for the Paris Olympics. Diamond League and other events will be training competitions. Since he has qualified much earlier, it has put us at ease. We have planned our programme in a way so as to get the best in Paris," Murali said. "Training conditions are very good here now. We have almost all the facilities here. All over Europe it is cold right now." Besides the big change in his travel plans, Sreeshankar will be looking to tweak his runup. Sreeshankar starts his runup from a static position, rocks back a bit before beginning his run. He will now attempt a running start.

"It will help him gain more speed on the runway. The only thing is that he has to convert it into distance. When he was very young he used to do that technique, for the sake of consistency he changed that to the standing approach. But if you are able to pick this approach, the least jump will be around 8.30m. Most long jumpers today have a running start, including Miltiadis Tentoglou (Tokyo Olympic champion)."

Sreeshankar tried this technique last year at the start of the season but went back to his tried and tested static start routine. "If you want to go big at the Olympics you have to do something extraordinary. The target is to go beyond the 8.50m mark and for that we have to do something different. That's the reason we are trying to bring this change in his runup."

3) With WTT Feeder title, Sathiyan gets 'belief' back in his game

India's Sathiyan Gnanasekaran(REUTERS

The move to come a step down not only earned the SAthiyan a title triumph, but also the feel of touching a high level again for the former world No.24.

From playing the big-ticket WTT Contender tournaments and most recently the prestigious Singapore Smash, G Sathiyan turned up for a WTT Feeder event in Lebanon this week. Battling to find form and confidence, it was a conscious decision on his part to “play a lot of matches and get into that rhythm”.The move to come a step down not only earned the current world No.103 a title triumph, but also the feel of touching a high level again for the former world No.24.

Sathiyan won the men’s singles title at the WTT Feeder Beirut beating higher-ranked compatriot Manav Thakkar 3-1 (6-11, 11-7, 11-7, 11-4) in the final on Thursday night. Sathiyan also went past India No.2 Harmeet Desai and Chinese Taipei's 39th-ranked Chuang Chih-Yuan, a former world No.3, along the way.

The 125 points from the event will make Sathiyan jump around 40 places in the updated rankings. And, with Sharath Kamal's surge to No.34 post his Singapore show and Desai and Thakkar too in the mix, will “give the selectors a good headache” — as Sathiyan put it — to pick the men’s team and two singles entries for the Paris Olympics. “This (title win) has come at the right time," Sathiyan said. “Having that big win against Chuang (in the semis) gave me a lot of confidence,

because that is where I felt I belonged. And converting it into a title, it really puts a lot of belief that I'm back to the elite level again. It's not just about winning; I felt like I played at a very good level. The belief in the game has returned.”

So has fluency in his stroke-making, he reckons. A drop in form, and spasms in his back during the Nationals last December, instilled doubts and jitters in his shots. Never before since he became a top 50 player in 2018 did Sathiyan’s rankings drop so drastically, nor did he go through a patch as lean as the one over the last few months. His confidence "low" coming back from the injury, Sathiyan couldn't advance beyond the qualifying rounds in the four big tournaments this year in Doha, Goa and Singapore. “It is really hard, there's no beating around the bush. It's hard when you've played at a certain level, and you know that it is dropping. Mentally you have to fight yourself first. But at one point when I was playing bad, I stopped comparing to how I was playing before. That is when I felt I moved ahead. You have to accept the present — that you are at this level — and then work from there,” he said.

A short break — “for a few days, I didn’t touch my racquet, because I felt like I was just circling around” — helped. On the fresher end of that, Sathiyan went deep into fixing his game, which revolved largely around not hurrying into his shots and getting his body sync going again. “I was losing close matches, which was frustrating. I introspected a lot — where the stroke-making or movements were going wrong. I decided to focus on my training even while I was at tournaments," he said.

And not too much at the rankings that nosedived. “Sure, at the beginning, it was a little shocking. But then I knew rankings are just a by-product, and that if you do the right things, it will take care of itself.”

Sathiyan is set to jump from the 100s to the 60s in the rankings with Desai (No.65) and Thakkar (No.74) also among the pack of Indian contenders for Paris in the men’s team and singles events. The belief in his game back, Sathiyan’s resurgence adds another dimension to the selection dilemma. “It will make things interesting now," Sathiyan chuckled. “All three of us are close to the top 50, so it's going to be fun. I like this healthy competition. Everyone is playing well. There are a few more events before the deadline. If I keep this momentum, there is a possibility to play in all the three events.”

Mixed form with Manika

The third event is mixed doubles, which Sathiyan had identified as India’s best shot at an Olympic medal while pairing up with Manika Batra. Showing promise initially, the results have plateaued of late for the 25th-ranked Indians.

“Mixed hasn't gone well in the last few months. Both of us had injuries and little dips in form at different points. We couldn't get that A game together on the day,” Sathiyan said. “But again, it’s a phase. I will carry this confidence into the mixed as well. We have a couple of events left before the Olympic qualifiers in April. We'll give it our best shot, and if we can make it, I still feel mixed has the best chance for a medal.”

4) Does India's drab draw against Afghanistan point to a deeper malaise?

India's Nikhin Pujari in action against Afghanistan(

Unless India produce a response on Tuesday or improve by June, a never-before third round in World Cup qualifiers could remain a dream The 0-0 draw against Afghanistan was the fifth straight match in which India have failed to score. That is 127 days and 535 minutes since Manvir Singh's goal against Kuwait away on November 16. With allegations against All India Football Federation (AIFF) refusing to go away, the disjointed performance in Abha, Saudi Arabia, added to the negative energy around the sport that, as per an Ormax Sports Audience report, has a following of 305 million in India and is after cricket in terms of popularity.

India can make a never-before third round of the World Cup qualifiers and the 2027 Asian Cup finals, so head coach Igor Stimac is right in looking at the final goal. But unless India produce a response in Guwahati on Tuesday in the reverse fixture or improve before Kuwait visit in June, they could fall a step short.

Another poor show against Afghanistan and it would seem the gains from last year have been squandered. In September 2023, India had lost to Iraq after leading twice because of a dodgy penalty and because Brandon Fernandes's shot in the tie-breaker hit the framework. In October, India scored twice against Malaysia and were denied another goal by inept refereeing.

Soulless in Saudi Arabia after the Asian Cup ended goalless and without a point lends a long-ago feel to those performances which came after an unbeaten run of 11 games and three trophies in four months. Campaigns that included matches where India pruned big chances against them, beat Lebanon and Kyrgyzstan, both ranked higher, and Kuwait. Titles that took India into the top 100 of the FIFA rankings. The goals against Iraq, Malaysia and Kuwait showed that against some teams, sharpness and creativity in attack weren’t restricted to home games. On Thursday evening (Friday in India), the problem resurfaced.

Vikram Pratap Singh’s inexperience can explain his lack of composure. Returning from injury, Jeakson Singh is not at his best. But if Fernandes, Liston Colaco, Lalengmawia Ralte, Sunil Chhetri, Manvir Singh, Akash Mishra and Nikhil Poojary cannot produce moments that will make the difference against a team hit by mutiny and one that is 41 places below India in FIFA rankings, it means Stimac has a big problem to fix.So lacking in imagination, inspiration and precision in the front third were India that it beggared belief that the players were the best available. Mishra’s poor form has continued, missing was the attacking smarts Poojary showed last year, most of Ralte’s passes were to the right which meant Naorem, also hit by a slump in form and playing out of position at his club, didn’t get adequate supply and Chhetri was anonymous. Like in the Asian Cup, India had no impact from the bench. All this when the players are in the middle of the season. A consequence of few clubs and not enough games in a season means India has a small players’ pool and when a number of them lose form at the same time, it becomes a problem. All India Football Federation (AIFF) slashing over ₹20 crore from its competitions budget is unlikely to help in that direction. Nor is it being mired in litigation, under scrutiny from Asian Football Confederation and under officials who don’t always deliver on their promises. “The Asian Cup and Asian Games were the two most important tournaments and AIFF really messed it up,” Bhaichung Bhutia has said.

The success of the national team is a function of the quality of competition in its top league. Foreign players have an outsized influence in ISL, as East Bengal coach Carles Cuadrat has pointed out, which means in an India shirt players must take on greater responsibility. The AIFF’s troubles are new, the rest not so. But including provisioning for preparatory camps, a lot will have to change if there has to be progress beyond making the third round.

5) Sathiyan wins first-ever WTT Feeder title

G Sathiyan in action

He defeated compatriot Manav Thakkar 3-1 (6-11 11-7 11-7 11-4) on the final day of WTT Feeder Beirut 2024 on Thursday night. Star paddler G. Sathiyan has become the first-ever Indian to win a men's singles trophy at a WTT Feeder Series event in Beirut, Lebanon He defeated compatriot Manav Thakkar 3-1 (6-11 11-7 11-7 11-4) on the final day of WTT Feeder Beirut 2024 on Thursday night.

Seeded No.11, Sathiyan enjoyed a rewarding path to the final in the Lebanese capital, taking down No.5 seed Harmeet Desai (15-13 6-11 11-8 13-11) and top seed Chuang Chih-Yuan (11-8 11-13 11-8 11-9) along the way.

But the match Sathiyan will remember most is the final as he overcame an early setback to see off No.9 seed Thakkar in four games.

The result marks Sathiyan's first men's singles success at a WTT event, and his first singles title at an international ranking event since ITTF Czech International Open 2021.

Meanwhile, Xia Lian Ni picked up her second WTT Feeder title in women's singles, producing an excellent display to break down Suh Hyo Won's defensive barrier 11-9 11-5 11-5. A wildcard entrant for the event, Ni dropped just one game on her way to the semifinal, and was even more clinical at the penultimate hurdle, needing just three games to dispatch No.2 seed Chen Szu-Yu (11-7 11-9 11-4).

Appearing in her first international women's singles final since 2018, Suh did everything in her power to try and lay her hands on a first WTT singles trophy.

But there was no denying Ni as the 60-year-old age-defying star collected her second title at this level, one year on from earning her first at WTT Feeder Havirov 2023.

In men's doubles, the Indian pair of Manav Thakkar and Manush Utpalbhai Shah had to be content with the second position, losing 11-5, 7-11 11-13 12-14) against Andy Pereira and Jorge Campos, who are the first pair from Cuba to strike WTT title success. Among other Indians, Diya Chitale and Manush Shah defeated Manav and Archana Kamath 3-1 (11-6 10-12 11-6 11-6) to win the mixed doubles title.

6) Ram Baboo – running a race of his own

Ram Baboo prevailed in testing conditions to finish third at the Dudinska 50 Meet in Slovakia, becoming the seventh Indian male race walker to make the cut for Paris in the 20km event

Coming from a humble background, Baboo has emerged one of India's top race walkers in the lead up to Paris Olympics It is tempting to assess Ram Baboo's incredible rise through the prism of his humble beginning. His rags-to-riches tale is, without doubt, inspirational but there is more to him than that. The 25-year-old finished third at the Dudinska 50 Meet in Slovakia last Saturday, clocking a personal best time of 1:20:00. In the process, he also breached the Paris Olympics qualification mark of 1:20:10.

A bronze medallist in the 35km race walk at the Hangzhou Asian Games, Baboo is the seventh Indian male walker to make the cut for Paris. The others —Akshdeep Singh, Suraj Panwar, Servin Sebastian, Arshpreet Singh, Pramjeet Bisht, and Vikas Singh — are currently training in South Africa under the tutelage of race walking coach Tatiana Sibileva while Baboo is back at his base in the Army Sports Institute (ASI) in Pune. Each country can field a maximum of three walkers in a category and the Athletics Federation of India (AFI) is likely to select the team in June.

But before that, Baboo will line up in Antalya for World Athletics Race Walking Team Championships. Having already trained in Antalya last year for a month after the Asian Games, he is confident of making an impression. "The podium finish in Slovakia is a big confidence booster. Also, prior knowledge of conditions in Antalya should stand me in good stead next month," he says. The race in Slovakia pitted Baboo in cold, testing conditions with temperatures plummeting to 7°C. A steady shower on the morning of the race didn't help matters. "It was quite chilly and it took a while for the body to warm up. The loop was wet too which affected the pace," Baboo, who is managed by IOS Sports and Entertainment, said.

The rhythm and pace of the race were also quite different from what Baboo is used to. While the Indian race walkers train to run the first half of the 20km race faster than the second half, the race in Dudince panned out differently. The lead group began slow, leaving Baboo to make hectic calculations on the go.

"I was running against my natural rhythm which is what made me very nervous. The race was quite slow for the first five kilometres. I had thought of picking up the pace after five kilometres and maintaining a steady tempo till 10 kilometres before accelerating. But the race went at the same pace for ten kilometres. It was only after halfway mark that the group began to accelerate," he remembered. "I knew at the back of my mind that if I go too slow, I may miss the Paris mark. At the 15km mark, I was clocking 1hr 16sec. I was slow in the 16th km even as the group picked pace. At that stage, I was 23 seconds slower than my target, and so, in the last four kilometres, I decided to go all out."

"I was making quick calculations in each kilometre — how many seconds I am in plus or minus. When you go slow, you are always wary of leaving too much to cover up." Baboo, who bettered his personal best time set in January, explained.

Having moved from marathon to race walking about six years back, Baboo picked up the nuances of the tricky discipline within a week. Race walking rules mandate that athletes must always have one foot in contact with the ground at all times, as visible to the human eye. Also, the walker's front knee must not bend as the body passes over it.

I started training for race walking in Saifai, UP, under coach Siddharth Krishna. He told me that people usually take up to six months to perfect the technique, but I picked it in 7 days. It told me that perhaps I made the right choice," Baboo, who has also competed in 50km and 35km events, said.

With sporting success translating into financial rewards, Baboo's father doesn't have to labour anymore. The youngster is also building a house in his village, a feat that was beyond imagination until last year.

"Tough times made me who I am. I don't regret anything. It doesn't matter where you begin, what matters is where you end," he mused. Baboo's race has only just begun.

 

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BOOK OF THIS WEEK:

Red River: A novel :by Somnath Batabyal (Author)

A FAST-PACED NOVEL ABOUT THREE BOYS WHO GROW UP IN THE EARLY YEARS OF MILITANCY IN ASSAM AND TAKE DIFFERENT PATHS INTO ADULTHOOD AND LOVE.

A sprawling novel set in the north-east of India, this is a lyrical exploration of male friendships and love—a man's love for a woman and a more militant love for community and nation. The action moves from Guwahati to Dhaka, Bhutan and London, surging and quietening as we encounter characters and situations so close to the bone that it's hard to step away till the last word has been read.

Somnath Batabyal is the author of two books, The Price You Pay, a political thriller set in Delhi, and Making News in India, an ethnography of television news practices in Rupert Murdoch’s ventures in India. He lives in London, where he teaches at the School of Oriental and African Studies.