Top 10 news of the day: ADR report on public funding, Chinese build-up along LAC & more

According to a report by Association for Democratic Reforms, BJP was the biggest recipient of political donations (Rs 698 crore), followed by the Congress (122.5 crores) in the year 2018-19. The Tata Group-backed Progressive Electoral Trust was the largest donor to political parties in 2018-19 with donations equalling Rs 455.15 crore, the report said.

The behaviour of Chinese troops on the Ladakh border is a sharp departure from a course of relationship over 30 years, and has left the relationship between India and China “profoundly disturbed, external affairs minister S Jaishankar said.



The violent clashes have also had a very deep public and political impact, the minister said, while speaking at a virtual event hosted by the Asia Society.

India on Friday successfully conducted a night trial of the indigenously developed nuclear-capable Prithvi-2 missile as part of a user trial by the Army from a test range in Odisha, defence sources said. The state-of-the-art surface-to-surface missile blasted off around 7.30 pm from launch complex 3 of the Integrated Test Range (ITR) at Chandipur near Balasore and the trial was successful, they said.

Heavy rains and floods have claimed at least 47 lives in Maharashtra's Pune, Aurangabad and Konkan divisions in the last three days while crops on lakhs of hectares were damaged extensively, officials said on Friday.


Twenty-eight persons have died in rain-related incidents in western Maharashtra which comes under Pune division, sixteen in central Maharashtra's Aurangabad division and three in coastal Konkan, they said.

The government is likely to decide on revising the minimum age of marriage for girls after it received a report by a committee set up for this purpose. "There is an important deliberation going on to decide what should be the ideal age of marriage for daughters," Prime Minister Narendra Modi said while addressing a video conference after releasing a commemorative coin of Rs 75 denomination on the 75th anniversary of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

The "zero-based" timetable for all passenger trains, which is likely to see many firsts including the dropping off nearly 600 mail/express trains and doing away with about 10,200 halts including night halts, would be notified in the next couple of months.

As per the plan, around 360 passenger trains would be upgraded as mail/express trains and 120 mail/ express trains would be upgraded to superfast trains category. Sources said the railway ministry is finalising the plan and would be notified soon.

Concerned by possibility of smoke from stubble burning in Punjab and Haryana choking the NCR, the Supreme Court-appointed one-man committee under former SC judge Madan Lokur to monitor the stubble fire and take preventive steps with help of chief secretaries of concerned states.

The SC asked the heads of National Cadet Corps, NSS and Bharat Scouts and Guides to put the young force at Lokur’s disposal to help locate stubble burning and bring it to notice of authorities to prevent crop burning.

The country's foreign exchange reserves surged by $5.867 billion to touch a record high of $551.505 billion in the week to October 9, according to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) data. In the previous week ended October 2, 2020, the reserves had increased by $3.618 billion to $545.638 billion.

US President Donald Trump has blamed countries like China, Russia and India for adding to the global air pollution and asserted that his country has the best environmental numbers."We have the best environmental numbers, ozone numbers, and so many other numbers. In the meantime, China, Russia, India all these countries they're spewing stuff into the air," he alleged during a rally.

Finally, Dinesh Karthik has done what many Kolkata Knight Riders fans wanted him to do for a fair while. After seven games -exactly at the halfway stage of the competition, Dinesh Kartik has handed over the Knight Riders' captaincy to England's limited-overs captain Eoin Morgan.

With four wins and three losses, KKR are fourth on the table. Looking weighed down by the burden of captaincy, Karthik has looked off-colour with the bat, scoring just 108 runs in seven games at 15.42 so far.