A 28-year-old man has been arrested for beating up his girlfriend and banging her head on a rock for refusing to get intimate with him at a public place in Bandra, Mumbai. Reports said the seriously-injured woman has been hospitalised and her condition is improving and the attacker has been charged by police for trying to kill her.

The accused, Akash Mukherjee, is a resident of Kalyan on the outskirts of Mumbai and the victim’s name is Lubna Javed Sukte, a resident of Bhiwandi. They are both aged 28 years and have been working in the same company and had been romantically linked for the last few years.

On Wednesday, they took a train from Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus and visited the Gateway of India and Girgaon Chowpatty before heading to Bandra bandstand in the evening. They sat near the rocks by the sea. The police said it was Mukherjee’s birthday.

Sometime later, Mukherjee told his girlfriend that he had converted to Islam to marry her. He said he had a certificate saying this which he would show to her parents and get consent to marry her. Soon, he tried to get physical with her and the woman rejected his advances.

She started crying, when he tried to stop her by covering her mouth. During the altercation, she bit his left hand. She tried to scream, but he tried to choke her.

The woman’s refusal filled him with rage and he tried to attack her. He hit her head against the rock. He also tried to drown her in the drain. After this, she screamed for help.

On hearing the scream, people nearby called police who took the man into custody. They sent the woman to the hospital. Bandra Police are investigating the case after arresting Mukherjee.    

After the stunning silence from Indian cricketers over women wrestlers’ protest against sexual harassment by Wrestling Federation of India chief, the World Cup 1983 winning team has come out in support of the protesting athletes.

They issued a joint statement on Friday condemning the way protesting wrestlers were manhandled by Delhi Police on May 28. The statement has been put out in the name of current BCCI boss Roger Binny, veteran cricketers Kapil Dev, Sunil Gavaskar, Mohinder Amarnath, K Srikkanth, Syed Kirmani, Yashpal Sharma (now deceased), Madan Lal, Balwinder Singh Sandhu, Sandeep Patil and Kirti Azad. Kapil Dev said the statement on the wrestlers is not an individual thing but the whole of the 1983 team stands by it.

The veteran cricketers said they were concerned by the fact that the wrestlers were going to immerse their hard-earned Olympic medals into the Ganga. They were shocked that the situation has come to such a pass that wrestlers are thinking of dumping their hard-earned medals into the Ganga because their medals were a result of years of effort, sacrifice, determination, and grit. The cricketers were unanimous that those medals don’t belong to the agitated wrestlers alone but with the nation’s pride and joy. They said they are distressed and disturbed at the unusual visuals of champion wrestlers being manhandled.

The protest has also been heartbreaking, the statement said, since it wrestlers who should be on the practice mat are out on the roads. The 1983 team added they are not in favour throwing their medals away because earning medals isn’t easy and urged the Government to sort out the issue as soon as possible.

Champion wrestlers Vinesh Phogat, Sakshi Malik and Bajrang Punia have been protesting in Delhi, demanding the arrest of Wrestling Federation of India (WFI) chief Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh for alleged sexual harassment of women wrestlers. Last Tuesday, they went to Haridwar to immerse their medals in the Ganga but changed plans with the intervention of farmer’s leaders. 

Under the leadership of Kapil Dev, the Indian cricket team won the country’s first World Cup trophy in 1983 beating the then cricketing superpower, the West Indies.

Bad roads have been a motorist’s bane and a traffic nightmare. We may have heard of roads caving in within days of being laid. But here is an incident that takes the cake and has a carpet involved in it. 

Recently, the residents of Hast Pokhari and Karjat in Ambad, Jalna district were shocked by the work done by the construction department and the contractor involved in the project, where a road in this area was laid as part of the Prime Minister’s Rural Road Scheme. 

The contractor claimed to employ German technology for the construction of the road. However, residents soon discovered that this claim was deceptive, as they had implemented a makeshift solution.

Conventional road construction uses a mixture of gravel, sand, and compacted soil to ensure durability. In contrast, the contractor in question had haphazardly spread the mixture directly onto a carpet-like material, rushing to complete the work.

This bizarre incident took the internet by storm, and a video of the same has been a talking point on the internet. Imagine what would have happened if this news had come from Bihar, said a user on Reddit. Others blamed the contractor and trolled him. 

The Maharashtra villagers are demanding justice from the government, and are looking for the engineer who approved this low-grade work.

Maharashtra has some 3 lakh km of roads, making it the state with the highest road density in India. 

In the recently held elections to the Karnataka Assembly, civic infrastructure deficiencies, including gaping potholes on roads, had added to the BJP’s anti-incumbency factor. As a result, the voters turned to Congress. In Uttar Pradesh, for instance, the quality of roads is far superior since the government keeps a close watch on things inconveniencing the citizenry. 

Road-laying work is usually the easiest way to pocket money for bureaucrats while overlooking the scant material or its quality. Without any accountability, such road laying has caused great damage to programmes like the MGNREGA, which ensure subsistence-level wages for the rural unemployed.