Onion prices likely to rise further in Bengaluru despite assurance from govt

Food

The price of 1kg onion is roughly around Rs 110 across the city, which is four-times the regular price.

Soumya Chatterjee

Like in many other states across the country, Bengaluru has also seen the price of onions soaring since mid-November. And it appears there is no respite for households or businesses which use the staple ingredient despite the government’s assurance.  The current going rate for 1 kg of onions is Rs 110 across the city which is four times the regular price. And if traders are to be believed then the situation is likely to worsen before it gets better. Naushad Ahmed, an onion and garlic merchant based in Bengaluru said that while the government has promised relief, there is none on the ground or the vegetable mandis. “The price has increased this week further. The wholesale price for grade A onion has touched Rs 120/ kg. Regular onions and smaller onions are costing Rs 80 and above per kg. Whatever the government says, there is no change on the ground,” Naushad said. He added, “Onions are a staple in most households and also used for many traditional dishes like sambar. So people are making a compromise. We are forced to sell at minimal margins as we know people won’t be able to afford. In Shivajinagar, some shops have started adding or replacing onions with cabbage in their samosas.” There have been reports of restaurants removing onion dosas from their menu as well.   While there was a similar crisis in 2017 as well, the situation was contained within a short period of time.  Idrees Chaudhury, general secretary Russell Market Trader's Association, said, “The crisis this time around compared to that of 2017 has affected Bengaluru much more. Last time around, we had seen the problem last not more than two weeks.” He added, “Sadly while prices are very high, neither the farmers or traders are profiting from it. It is only the hoarders who are making things worse even though there is a genuine dearth of supply. The government should ensure that every gram of produce is accounted for from the farm to the mandi with the help of government societies. Unfortunately, not all of the products are reaching the mandis which is resulting in this artificial rise of prices.” Primarily the price hike has been due to the low production of the crop this year due to both drought and excess rainfall. The phenomenon was also witnessed in north Karnataka itself.  Karnataka grows 13% of the country’s onion and is third-largest producer. Maharashtra which produces 38% of the country’s onion and also the largest onion producing state also suffered similar extreme climatic conditions. The prevailing crisis saw the Centre asking the states to impose stock limits on traders and to ensure strict action against hoarding on Monday. In Monday’s review meeting with Committee of Secretaries on onion prices, Cabinet Secretary Rajiv Gauba directed the states to maintain considerable buffer stocks, impose stock limits on traders and to ensure strict action against hoarding. Earlier the export of onions was also restricted for the entire season.  Chief Secretaries from Maharashtra, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Telangana, Madhya Pradesh, Chattisgarh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Haryana participated in the video conference. Gauba said that the Union Government has approved the import of 11,000 metric tonnes of onions from Turkey to tide over the situation. The deliveries are expected from the last week of December. This is in addition to the decision of the government to import 6,900 metric tonnes of onions from Egypt. The deliveries are expected from second week of December. The Cabinet Secretary also directed the states to utilise their Food and Civil Supply Departments to procure and distribute onions at reasonable prices. Speaking to TNM, Sujatha H, Additional Director of Karnataka Food and Civil Supplies Department said, “We have been carrying out raids based on inputs from other departments and our intelligence inputs. But so far we have not come across such cases.”  “We can’t do anything about prices. That has to be decided by the Horticultural and Agriculture departments,” she added.  GR Sreenivasan, Chairman of Horticultural Producers’ Co-operative Marketing and Processing Society (HOPCOMS) was unavailable for comment. Deputy CM Laxman Savadi’s office who holds the Agriculture Ministry refused to comment citing model code of conduct for the byepolls. 

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Rohan Murty and Aparna Krishnan get married in private ceremony in Bengaluru

Wedding

The intimate ceremony was attended by family and friends, including Infosys co-founders.

TNM Staff

Rohan Murty, son of NR Narayana Murthy and Sudha Murty, married Aparna Krishnan in a private ceremony in Bengaluru on Monday. The couple decided to go for an intimate setting instead of a big wedding and took their wedding vows surrounded by family and friends. The wedding was followed by a reception at the same hotel venue in the city. While Rohan wore a simple olive coloured kurta and pants, Aparna was dressed in an elegant white lehenga with floral embroidery for the reception. The couple, who met through common friends, knew each other for three years before they decided to take the big step. Among the attendees for the couple’s big day were Infosys co-founders Nandan Nilekani, Kris Gopalakrishnan, SD Shibulal, and K Dinesh, CEO Salil Paresh. Also present were former Infosys board members TV Mohandas Pai and V Balakrishnan, along with former CFO Mavinakere Ranganath. Congratulations Rohan Murthy & Aparna Krishnan.  It was a pleasure spinning. pic.twitter.com/JuwOQV0Itf — Jasmeet Singh (@DJJasmeet) December 3, 2019 Other guests included family members like Rohan’s sister Akshata Murty, and ace badminton coach Prakah Padukone. Carnatic vocalist Bombay Jayashree was also present, and mesmerised guests with her music.   Thirty-six-year-old Rohan holds a PhD in computer science from Harvard University on ‘Opportunistic Wireless Network Architectures’ and is the founder a company called Soroco that uses algorithms and does away with human intervention in certain processes. He is also founder of the Murty Classical Library of India. He is also a junior fellow at Harvard Society of Fellows. Aparna’s parents are Savithri Krishna, a retired SBI employee, and Commander KR Krishnan, who served in the Indian Navy. The Bengaluru resident went to Leser B Pearson United World College of the Pacific in Canada, and then graduated in economics from Dartmouth College. She also studied political science in London School of Economics. She has worked in Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, Sequoia Capital and has been working at Soroco, a computer software company founded in 2014 by Rohan, as the Engagement Manager from April 2017.

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Kerala techie’s decomposed body found in Bengaluru: Family alleges police apathy

Crime

Despite the cops accessing their live location, they failed to track down the bodies of Srilakshmi and Abhijith for 40 days, allege relatives.

Sreedevi Jayarajan

On October 13, a visibly shaken police officer from Kerala reached the Parappana Agrahara police station in South East Bengaluru. The officer, identified as Abhilash, had come to file a missing persons complaint. His 21-year old niece Srilakshmi, who had moved to Bengaluru 6 months ago to work in an IT major, had gone missing. A colleague of hers named Abhijith Mohan too had gone missing. A native of Mala in Thrissur, Srilakshmi last contacted her relatives on October 10. Since then, her phone was switched off and her whereabouts unknown to her family. According to the family, the officers at the Parappana Agrahara station seemed least interested in the case. Infact, the Circle Inspector at the police station barely asked them any questions about the missing persons, they allege. “It took the police all afternoon to even lodge an FIR. The FIR copy that they gave us had no crime number and no date. The CI of the station made us wait for hours and finally arrived at the station in the afternoon. He was on his phone throughout and did not ask us any queries regarding the complaint,” recalls Sethumon, Srilakshmi’s uncle who had accompanied Abhilash to the police station. For the next 40 days, Abhilash, Sethumon and their relatives from Kerala combed through all possible locations to track down Srilakshmi and her colleague. They were unsuccessful in their attempts. On November 26th - 40 days later - a local landlord from the Chinthala Madiwala area, 23 kms away away from Bengaluru discovered two highly decomposed bodies in a desolate area, lying near bushes. They were later identified to be that of the missing duo. Distress calls, SOS texts At 5:30 pm on October 10, Srilakshmi rang up her uncle Sethumon with a request. That was the last time he heard from her, Sethumon recalls. “She wanted me to identify a good psychiatrist for her friend. She said that he had been going through some issues and needed a Malayali doctor that he could be comfortable in speaking to. Since then her phone was switched off,” he says. On October 12, a day after they went missing, two of Srilakshmi’s and Abhijith’s friends received distress texts from the duo, urgently asking to be rescued. TNM accessed a screenshot of the messages sent by Srilakshmi and Abhijith to one of the friends. As per this screenshot, a live location of the couple was shared with the friend. And the 4 accompanying text messages, supposedly typed by Abhijith, read “somebody please come and rescue us immediately. It is urgent.” “Their friends had gone to rescue the two of them, but returned after the two of them refused to come out of the thick forest. The friends say they returned as they were spooked,” Sethumon says. On October 13, the Parappana Agrahara police was given all the details of the missing duo along with the complaint by Srilakshmi’s uncles. These details included the live location that the couple shared with the two friends who attempted to rescue them. On November 26 - the bodies of the two were found hanging in a forested area in Chinthala Madiwala, barley 500 mts away from the exact live location the duo had shared with their friends. Not only did the police not act on time to save the missing persons, they had even failed to track down the corpses for over one month, alleges Sethumon. “Why did the police not look for them? Their dead bodies were discovered from a spot close to this location shared on the map,” Sethumon says. No action on Habeas Corpus On October 18, Srilakshmi’s uncles filed a Habeas Corpus petition at the Karnataka High Court to track their niece down. However, this too yielded zero results, as they allege that the police officers at Parappana Agrahara were lukewarm at best in their search. “The CI in the Parappana Agrahara station never rang us up even once. Not even after we filed the Habeas Corpus. Had they once properly searched the live location sent by my niece properly, they would have found the bodies way earlier,” says Sethumon. Following the discovery of their bodies, several media houses reported that Srilakshmi had contacted her family on November 23, three days before her remains were found. The reports also stated that the duo had killed themselves as their families had opposed to their marriage over caste differences. The first claim has been proven false as the Deputy Commissioner of Anekal confirmed to TNM that based on forensic reports, the bodies are at least a month old. Therefore, Srilakshmi could not have sent a message on November 23. The family denies that they had opposed the ‘relationship’. “We did not know of his existence. How and why should we oppose anything then? Moreover, we now know that both are of the same caste, and so the media reports that we were against inter caste wedding is planted by Bengaluru police,” says Sethumon. “Both of them are Nairs, so there is no caste issue here. It is entirely fabricated. I suspect that it is the police who have cooked up stories that Srilakshmi had contacted us on November 23. We strongly believe that the police are writing their own narrative in this case to hide their criminal neglect of duty,” Sethumon further alleged. An unnatural death case now been registered in the Hebbagodi police station, which has jurisdiction over Chinthala Madiwala - the area from where the bodies were recovered. TNM contacted Bengaluru South East DCP Isha Pant for a comment. She added that Chinthala Madiwala, where the bodies of the deceased were found, came under the the Hebbagodi police station limits, which was not under her jurisdiction. TNM also contacted SP Ravi D Channannavar of Bengaluru Rural Zone who stated that the missing complaint was filed in the Parappana Agrahara police station, which came under the jurisdiction of the Bengaluru Rural SP Isha Pant. 

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Bengaluru police arrest two for stealing cash from ATM kiosks

Crime

The two accused were nabbed by police on Saturday while attempting to carry out their elaborate modus operandi.

TNM Staff

City police have arrested two men and are investigating them for allegedly stealing money from ATM kiosks using a very elaborate method. According toreports, the accused have been identified as 23-year-old Shahid and 28-year-old Shahajahad who are both natives of Haryana, working in Bengaluru. According to reports, the duo ran a very elaborate modus operandi to steal money from ATM kiosks throughout the city. First, they would identify a kiosk that was not protected by a security guard and was not in an extremely crowded area. They would then physically turn the CCTV camera(s) in the kiosk away from the machine and use a valid ATM card to withdraw cash. As the machine would begin to disburse the cash one of the men would hold onto the money without pulling it out from the machine, which triggers an error message in the machine. At this point, the other partner would turn off the power supply to the ATM at which time the man holding onto the money from the machine would remove it. Since the power was cut as the machine was dispensing the money, the amount would not be reflected as being debited in their individual bank accounts. The incident came to light when a bank manager visited one of the ATM kiosks and noted that the CCTV camera had been turned away. Plainclothes police were dispatched to the region surrounding the ATM and kept watch on the kiosk. The two accused were nabbed by police on Saturday while attempting to steal money using the same modus operandi. Police suspect that the duo has stolen hefty amounts of money from ATM kiosks around the country in a similar manner. Speaking to the Hindu, Inspector Mohammed Mukarram stated that the accused duo had duped several banks out of lakhs of rupees.

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Campaigning for crucial Karnataka bypolls ends

Politics

The by-elections were necessitated due to disqualification of 14 Congress and 3 JD-S rebel legislators after they resigned from the Assembly in mid-July in protest against the then JD-S-Congress coalition government's functioning.

IANS

Campaigning for the crucial by-elections to 15 assembly seats in Karnataka on Thursday ended on Tuesday evening, with leaders and candidates of political parties and others doing their utmost to woo the electorate as the results could influence the state's future political course. "The 13-day campaign concluded peacefully in all the 15 assembly constituencies. Barring stray incidents, there were no law and order issues, as our officials kept a strict vigil for any the violation of the model code of conduct," an election official told IANS. Polling will be held on Thursday from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. and votes count will be counted on December 9. "We have directed political leaders, workers and poll campaign managers who are not voters in the poll-bound areas to leave the area and candidates have been advised not to use loudspeakers during the 48-hour silent period," the official said. The candidates and their supporters, however, can canvass door-to-door on Wednesday and appeal to voters to cast their ballot on Thursday. The by-elections were necessitated due to disqualification of 14 Congress and 3 JD-S rebel legislators after they resigned from the Assembly in mid-July in protest against the then JD-S-Congress coalition government's functioning. The by-elections will be held in Athani, Kagwad, Gokak, Yellapura, Hirekerur, Ranibennur, Vijaynagara, Chikkballapura, K.R. Pura, Yeshwanthpura, Mahalakshmi Layout, Shivajinagara, Hosakote, K.R. Pete and Hunsur. By-elections in two assembly segments -- Muski (Raichur district) and R.R. Nagar (Bengaluru) have been withheld due to litigation in the Karnataka High Court over their results in the May 2018 stare assembly elections. As many as 165 candidates, including 126 Independents and 9 women are in the fray for the 15 assembly seats. The BJP and the opposition Congress are contesting in all the 15 assembly seats, while the JD-S has fielded candidates in 12 seats. The BJP has fielded 11 former rebel Congress and 3 former rebel JD-S legislators who joined the party on November 14 after the Supreme Court on November 13 allowed them to re-contest though it upheld their disqualification by then Assembly Speaker K.R. Ramesh Kumar. The BJP has fielded its former corporate Sarvana from the prestigious Shivajinagara constituency in Bengaluru central. For the ruling BJP, Chief Minister B.S. Yediyurappa, three Deputy Chief Ministers G.M. Karjol, Ashwath Narayan and Laxman Savadi and dozen cabinet ministers campaigned along with hundreds of party cadres and supporters. For the Congress, its former Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, party's state unit president Dinesh Gundu Rao and other senior leaders, including Mallikarjun Kharge and D.K. Shivakumar participated in the electioneering. JD-S supremo H.D. Deve Gowda and his son and former Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy led the party's campaign with senior leaders and legislators in the 12 assembly segments it is contesting.

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2 months after Bengaluru woman's death, 6-yr-old son's help proves it was murder

Crime

The accused has been identified as 21-year-old G Venkatesh Kumar, who confessed to having had an extramarital affair with the woman and killing her.

TNM Staff

Image for representation

Two months after a 23-year-old woman from Bengaluru died, a recent statement by the victim’s 5-year-old son was able to help police conclude that the woman had been murdered. The victim, identified as Sumata, was a worker at a garment factory in Chinnayanapalya. According to reports, she had been found dead at her residence on September 18. As she had been unwell for some time, her husband didn’t have any reason to suspect foul play. However, two months after her death, a statement made by the woman’s young son led her husband, Devaraj, to suspect that something was amiss. He approached Anekal police who also spoke to the boy and decided to exhume the woman’s body to investigate. “One day Venkatesh mama came home. He and amma went inside the room and they were talking loudly. Then I saw mama hit amma with a club on the back. I saw mama tying a sari around amma’s neck. She fell down and I ran out of fear,” the boy reportedlytold his father. “The man approached us with this complaint and said that the boy’s statement reminded him of some rumours that there was an affair happening between his wife and the accused. He had also realised that he had not seen the accused around the time of his wife’s death. We also spoke to the boy and he repeated what he had told his father,” said police at the Anekal station in Bengaluru to TNM. The accused has been identified as 21-year-old G Venkatesh Kumar, a resident of Chinnayanapalya who confessed to having had an extramarital affair with Sumata. As per his confession, Sumata wanted to end the relationship to which he objected. She threatened to reveal everything to his family, which angered him and led him to kill her by stranglulation. A charge sheet will be filed soon.

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Bengaluru man allegedly kills wife, tries to mislead cops claiming she met with accident

Crime

According to the International Airport Traffic Police, Tej Singh constantly fought with his wife.

TNM Staff

The Bengaluru police have arrested a 27-year-old man for allegedly murdering his wife and misleading the police by claiming she died in a car accident. On Tuesday, the International Airport Police arrested Tej Singh, a resident of BV Raman Nagar near Bengaluru’s Hunasemaranahalli. Tej Singh and his wife Dipal Kamwar (27), originally from Rajasthan, had settled in Bengaluru a few years ago. According to the police, Tej Singh constantly fought with his wife. “The couple had a lot of marital problems and in November, he decided to kill her,” a police official told TNM.  On the night of November 16, Tej Singh allegedly came home and on the pretext of making up for fighting with Dipal, he allegedly suggested that they go out for dinner. The couple went to have dinner at a nearby restaurant and when it was time to leave, Tej Singh allegedly suggested that they go on a long drive. He booked a rental car and drove Dipal to Bechahalli Gate (which falls under the International Airport Police jurisdiction) located on the way to Nandi Hills. Police say that Tej Singh allegedly stopped the car, dragged Dipal on to the road and when she began running, he ran the car over her. He then called 100 and when the police arrived, Tej Singh allegedly claimed that his wife was run over by a man who was driving the rental car at high speed. He allegedly told the police that the driver fled after the accident. The International Airport Traffic Police registered a case under sections 304 (criminal negligence), 279 (rash driving) and 134 (abetment of assault) of the Indian Penal Code.  The police had sent Dipal’s body for an autopsy and the postmortem report concluded that Dipal died due to a head injury. “The autopsy suggested that her head was smashed. The car had hit her on the torso and the force with which she fell down could not have killed her. We then questioned Tej Singh as we suspected he may have something to do with her death. He later confessed to killing her,” the police said. The International Airport Traffic Police then transferred the case to the law and order police, who registered a murder case against Tej Singh. The International Airport Police have seized the rental car as evidence. Tej Singh has been remanded to judicial custody.    

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