Jharkhand Mukti Morcha-backed Rajya Sabha member Kanwar Deep Singh’s defection to the Trinamul Congress led to violent clashes between workers of the two parties at the Ranchi airport on Monday as he arrived in the Jharkhand capital after an aborted bid to visit the city last week.
Mr Singh, a Chandigarh-based tycoon who was elected to the nation’s upper House from Jharkhand in June 2010 amid controversy and allegations of crores of rupees having changed hands, caused bitterness among leaders of the state’s ruling JMM when he jumped the fence to join the Mamata Banerjee-led party allegedly to further his spreading business interests. The TMC has practically no base in Jharkhand, and sources said the people who called themselves TMC workers and clashed with the JMM workers could be “hired for the purpose”.
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Fog returns to Delhi, flights hit
Age Correspondent
New Delhi
Jan. 31: Flight schedules were severely hit by very dense fog that enveloped the IGI Airport on Monday morning, resulting in inconvenience to thousands of passengers. About 150 flights were delayed or rescheduled and at least 13 flights were cancelled while three others were diverted.
Dense fog hit the Delhi airport at about 3.30 am following which low-visibility procedures were implemented. In fact, all flights after 5.45 am from the IGI Airport were rescheduled and this lasted for a few hours. Visibility improved by about 10 am and the low visibility procedures finally ceased to be implemented at about 12.30 pm.
According to airport sources, visibility shrunk to just about 50 metres in the early hours when flights could not even take off since the take-off minima could not be met. Of the 13 cancelled flights, eight were departures and five were arrival flights. IGI officials said over 100 flights operated on Monday in low visibility conditions with the help of CAT instrumentation landing systems. Of these, 22 flights operated using the CAT-IIIB ILS system when runway visibility is between 50 to 200 metres.