City: Lucknow

One corner of the open railway yard at Alambagh resembles a foundry. Strewn with pieces of scrap metal of different sizes and shapes, one can hear sounds of metal being hammered, sawed and cut and the intermittent crackle of the welding torch. But peep in, and you soon realise you are in a roofless studio where sculptures are being crafted from waste metal. In one corner you see an incomplete sculpture of Lord Buddha, and next to it, quite unexpectedly, a model of a fighter jet. Close to it, you can see artists giving final touches to a metallic dragon…

On the face of it all, the Lucknow Municipal Corporation (LMC) could not care less, even though the city is union defence minister Rajnath Singh’s constituency. The cleanliness survey conducted earlier this year by the Union Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) ranked Lucknow as one of the dirtiest cities in the country. The city’s ranking dropped to 121, from 115 last year. Despite having an army of 9350 sanitation workers, 6281 of them on contract, and showing an increase in monthly petrol consumption of 1.5 lakh litres for transporting solid waste, the municipal corporation has fared poorly in…

Lucknow Lok Sabha (Parliamentary) Constituency comprises five assembly constituencies - Lucknow West, Lucknow North, Lucknow East, Lucknow Central and Lucknow Cantt. Being the capital of India's most populous state,Uttar Pradesh, Lucknow is one of the most important political seats in the country. It saw two noted women freedom fighters - Vijayalakshmi Pandit and Sheorajvati Nehru - as its first two MPs in the first ever Lok Sabha; both were incidentally relatives of Jawaharlal Nehru, then PM of India. Lucknow is also the home constituency of ex-Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee who was elected to the LS from here five times…

Riding on the wave of riverfront development as exemplified by the Gujarat Sabarmati Riverfront project, the Uttar Pradesh government approved the Gomti Riverfront Development Project (GRDP) at an estimated cost of Rs 656.58 crore in March 2015.  By September 2017, Rs 1447.84 crore had already been spent, though the project still remains incomplete. Now, in a CAG audit report tabled on February 7 this year, the project has come under scathing criticism, on various grounds as outlined below: The case of the missing tender invites The office of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India examined files of the project…

The spate of horrific news from schools across the country does not seem to subside. The most recent incident, of course, is the mysterious death of a Class 9 student in the school toilet in northeast Delhi's Karawal Nagar. It is suspected that the teen died of internal injuries resulting from assault by a group of friends. Earlier this year in Lucknow, Hrithik Sharma, a Class 1 student, was stabbed on the back, chest and left eye by a girl in Class 7, in anticipation of a holiday that the school would inevitably declare in the wake of such a…