DAILY FROM: AHMEDABAD, CHANDIGARH, DELHI, JAIPUR, KOLKATA, LUCKNOW, MUMBAI, NAGPUR, PUNE, VADODARA JOURNALISM OF COURAGE SATURDAY, DECEMBER 28, 2024, LUCKNOW, LATE CITY, 18 PAGES `6.00 WWW.INDIANEXPRESS.COM SINCE 1932 UNION CABINET CONDOLES FORMER PM’S PASSING, NATIONAL MOURNING UNTIL JANUARY 1 Dr Singh’s final journey today State funeral for former PM today; his life a lesson on rising above hardship: Modi NEW DELHI, DECEMBER 27 ASTHEnationmournedandprepared for the last rites of former PrimeMinisterManmohanSingh whodiedThursdaynightinNew Delhi, Prime Minister Narendra Modihailedhispredecessoras“a kind-hearted individual, a scholarlyeconomist,andaleaderdedicated to reforms”. Singhwillbeaccordedastate funeral Saturday which will be a half-day holiday in all Central government offices and public sector undertakings. TheMinistryof HomeAffairs, in a communication, stated: “It has been decided by the Government that State funeral will be accorded to Dr. Manmohan Singh. The funeral will take place at 11:45 am on 28th December, 2024 at Nigambodh Ghat, New Delhi.” The MHA asked the Ministry of Defence to “make arrangements for State funeral with full military honours”. According to a statement issued after a meeting of the Union Cabinet, chaired by Prime Minister Modi, state mourning hasbeendeclaredforsevendays until January 1. During the mourning period, the Tricolour will be flown at half-mast across the country and at Indian missions and High Commissions abroad. At its meeting, the Cabinet BUSINESS AS USUAL BY UNNY CONSUMPTION EXPENDITURE SURVEY Prime Minister Narendra Modi pays his last respects to former Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh at his residence in New Delhi on Friday. Union Home Minister Amit Shah was among those present. ANI AICC OFFICE TO NIGAMBODH GHAT 9.30 AM: Singh’s final journey starts from AICC Hqs in New Delhi. 11.45 AM: State funeral with military honours at Nigambodh Ghat. HALF-DAY HOLIDAY declared at all Central govt offices and PSUs. 7-DAY MOURNING until January 1. Tricolour to be flown at half-mast. paidhomagetoSinghbyobservingatwo-minutesilenceandextended“itsheartfeltcondolences onbehalf of theGovernmentand CONTINUED ON PAGE 2 Govt agrees to Congress request for Singh memorial space, a practice UPA ended in 2013 MANOJ C G NEW DELHI, DECEMBER 28 THEGOVERNMENTFridaynight said it had agreed to a Congress requestforallocationof spacefor a memorial to former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh who died Thursday and will be accorded a state funeral Saturday. The government announcement came hours after the Congress alleged that its request for a resting place in Delhi for Singhhadnotbeenhonouredby the government. In a late night statement, the Congress leaders Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra at Singh’s residence in New Delhi, Friday. PTI From a village in Pakistan, a last dua goes out for ‘Mohna’, the boy who left during Partition DIVYA GOYAL GOPAL LUDHIANA, DECEMBER 27 ON FRIDAY, more than 600 km from where the body of ManmohanSinghlayinstate,the villagers of Gah in Pakistan’s West Punjab gathered to say the last dua (prayer) for their “Dr Saab”. They met at the residence of Raja Mohammad Ali, the only one among them who had actuallyseenSinghsincehe,asalittle child, left this village in Chakwal district eight decades ago. On both sides, a pain remained — that Singh could not The revamped building of the Government Boys’ Primary School at Gah in Pakistan which Singh attended as a child Ministry of Home Affairs said: “Todaymorning,theGovernment received a request to allocate space for a memorial for former Prime Minister Late Dr Manmohan Singh, from the Congress Party President. Immediately after the Cabinet meeting, HM Shri Amit Shah communicated to Congress President Shri Kharge and the family of Late Dr Manmohan Singh that the Government will allocate space for the memorial. Inthemeanwhile,cremationand otherformalitiescanhappenbecauseatrusthastobeformedand CONTINUED ON PAGE 2 INSIDE PAGES 8, 9, 10, 11, 16 Changing India’s world make the promised visit to Gah. Ali, his childhood friend and primary school classmate, who travelled to Delhi in 2008 to visit his “Mohna (lovable child, in Punjabi)” while he was PM, passed away in 2010. For Gah, though, the signs of its link to Singh are everywhere. As Ali’s nephew Aashiq Hussain said at the dua ceremony: “Had Dr Saab not been there, our village would have none of this — the two-lane road, the high school, vocational training, solar power. Poora gaaon afsos ka izhaar kar raha hai jaise koi ghar NOIDA, DECEMBER 27 DAYS AFTER a teenager was chargesheeted for the September murder of a nineyear-old student at a boarding school in Uttar Pradesh’s Hathras, the family that runs the institution is now demanding “justice” in the case. PAGE 1 ANCHOR a turn with the detention of the teenager, a student from the same school, Dinesh’s cousin Rahul is now questioning the pace of investigation, claiming that his uncle and brother were in jail on “wrong charges”. The villagers, he claimed, are now “seeing the family differently”. “My grandfather, Dorilal Baghel, died on November 16, as CCONTINUED ON PAGE 2 ABDULRAHMANMakki,brotherin-law of 26/11 Mumbai attack mastermind Hafiz Saeed and deputy chief of Lashkar-e-Taiba frontJamaat-ud-Dawa(JuD),died of a heart attack in Lahore Friday. Sources said Indian intelligenceagenciestoohavereceived this information. Makki was wanted by India for his role in NEW DELHI, DECEMBER 27 REVERSING A declining trend from over a decade, the share of food in monthly expenditure of householdsinruralaswellasurban areas went up in 2023-24, according to the Household Consumption Expenditure Survey (HCES) 2023-24 fact sheet released by the Ministry of StatisticsandProgrammeImplementation (MoSPI) on Friday. Thisprobablyreflectstheimpact of higher food prices; given that the figures are in nominal terms, the share of food in the consumption basket of rural householdswentupto47.04per cent in 2023-24 from 46.38 per cent in 2022-23, while that for urbanhouseholdsinchedhigher to 39.68 per cent in 2023-24 E What the data ● shows A CLOSER look at the data reveals that the top 5 per cent of the rural and urban population saw a decrease in consumption spending in 2023-24, even as all other segments of the population, including the bottom 5 per cent, registered an increase in spending. from 39.17 per cent in the previous year. The HCES data also showedthatthedifferenceinaverage monthly consumption CONTINUED ON PAGE 2 CORPUS: RS 6,284 CRORE PRATAPBHANUMEHTA PM CARES Fund received Rs 912 crore contribution in year after Covid pandemic Manmohanomics, in his own words HARIKISHAN SHARMA ASHOKGULATI The pragmatic idealist RAGHURAMRAJAN We are living off his vision CONTINUED ON PAGE 2 NEW DELHI, DECEMBER 27 AANCHAL MAGAZINE Manmohan to Muhammad Ali, with humility 26/11 plotter Makki, brother-in-law Teen chargesheeted, kin of jailed of Hafiz Saeed, dies in Lahore school director seeks ‘justice’ EXPRESS NEWS SERVICE On 26 September, after the bodyof thestudentwasfoundin the backseat of a car owned by the director of his school, Dinesh Baghel, the police arrested five people — Baghel, his father JasodhanSingh,andthreeschool teachers — in connection with thecase,withthepolicesuspecting the child could have been a “human sacrifice”. But after investigations took Data show urban-rural gap dropped to 70% in 2023-24 from 84% in 2011-12 CRAJAMOHAN HATHRAS STUDENT MURDER NEETIKA JHA Household spending on food rises in rural areas, shrinking gap with urban centres EXPLAINED EXPRESS NEWS SERVICE Designated as a global terrorist by the UN in 2023 the Mumbai terror attack as one of the plotters. The news agency PTI reporting from Lahore quoted the JuD as saying that Makki, a diabetic, had been ill for the past few days and was undergoing treatment at a private hospital. “Makki suffered a cardiac arrest early this morningandhebreathedhislast in the hospital,” a JuD member told PTI. Makki was handed six months imprisonment in a terror-financing case in 2020 by an anti-terrorism court in Pakistan. He had been keeping a low profile after the sentence. In 2023, Makki was CCONTINUED ON PAGE 2 NEW DELHI, DECEMBER 27 THE PRIME Minister’s Citizen Assistance and Relief in Emergency Situations Fund (PM CARES Fund) received Rs 912 croreincontributionsduringthe financial year 2022-23 as donations continued to pour in even after the Covid pandemic. The PM CARES Funds received Rs 909.64 crore as voluntary contributions and Rs 2.57 crore as foreign contributions during 2022-23, the latest year for which audited accounts are available in the public domain. Inadditiontodonationsof Rs 912 crore, the Fund also received Rs 170.38 crore as interest income, of which Rs 154 crore came from interest on regular accountsandRs16.07crorefrom foreign contributions account. It also received about Rs 225 crore CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FUND (In Rs crore) Year Voluntary Foreign 2019-20 3,076.85 0.39 2020-21 7,183.77 494.93 2021-22 1,896.76 40.12 2022-23 909.64 2.57 Total 13,067.02 538.01 Source: pmcares.gov.in in form of refunds from various sources, including refund (Rs 202 crore) from procurement of 50,000 ‘Made in India’ ventilatorstogovernmenthospitalsrun by the Centre/States/UTs. As far as payments and disbursals are concerned, the PM CARES Fund disbursed the total amount of Rs 439 crore during CONTINUED ON PAGE 2 A village remembers: Benegal took it to the world in Manthan PARIMAL DABHI SANGANVA (RAJKOT), DEC 27 “AA BHAGLO, Smitaben no dikro (Meet Bhaglo, son of Smita Patil)”. That’s how Bhagwanji Rakhaiya, 54, a contractor from Rajkot’s Sanganva village — where Shyam Benegal’s 1976 masterpiece Manthan was shot in the 1970s — has been introducedtoanyonenewforthepast 50-odd years. Bhagwanji played the part of BhaglaBhagwan,thetoddler-son of Smita Patil’s Bindu in the na- tional award-winning movie, whichrecountsthetaleof India’s ‘Milk Revolution’ but also with powerfulundertonesofcasteand gender hierarchies in villages. On December 24, Benegal, considered the father of India’s parallel cinema, breathed his last at the age of 90 in Mumbai’s Wockhardt Hospital. But for Sanganva,Benegal’slegacylivesin every corner of the village — its walls, its houses, even its empty grounds where the crew of the movie, including big names such asGirishKarnadandNaseeruddin Shah, would play volleyball, and even in its caller tunes. It was in this village of 1,500, locatedsome25kmfromdistrict headquarters Rajkot, that the crew camped for 45 days as they completed what went on to become one of India’s most enduring ‘arthouse’ cinemas. Bhagwanjiwasonlyatoddler when he appeared in Manthan. But he remembers what his father told him about the shoot. Now, he talks about the time whenacousintookhimtoabarber’s shop for a routine haircut. “As soon as the film crew heard about this, they rushed to One of the houses in Rajkot’s Sanganva village which was used for the shooting of Manthan the barber’s and did not allow the haircut as that would have disturbed the uniformity of my look in the film,” he tells The Indian Express. In another part of the village, 65-year-oldAmbabhaiRakhaiya, whosehousewasusedasBindu’s home in the movie, talks fondly and proudly of the time that the crew shot the famous buffalo poisoning scene from the movie outside their house. The crew then gifted the buffalo to the family, who named it ‘Manthan’ and tended to it till its death. “I observed a fast when Benegaldiedasamarkofrespect. Agreatmanwhobroughttofilms theissueofuntouchabilityforthe firsttime.Beforethat,nobodyhad donethat,”Rakhaiya,aDalit,says. According to Deputy Sarpanch Narendrasinh Jadeja, 68, a now run-down house of one of his relatives in the village was taken on rent for the shoot. The film’s lead, Girish Karnad, is shown in the movie as living in this house. “Benegal lived in a house owned by Girivarsinh Jadeja, then the general manager of the Opera House in Mumbai,” he says. “Some crew members would play volleyball outside this house after the day’s shoot. I would also join them at times. Smita Patil had even got two lightsinstalledtheresothatthey could play even at night.” But not everyone in the village was so accommodating of the crew’s demands. One of them was Punjabhai Rakhaiya, 72, whose house the crew sought for the shoot. “There is a scene in the film where a locality has been set on fire. The film crew asked us to CONTINUED ON PAGE 2 Lucknow