On October 8, 2019, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh received India’s first Rafale fighter jet at Mérignac in France. It was Vijayadashami. He performed a shastra puja, the worship of weapons. He wrote “Om” on the jet and laid flowers and a coconut on it. Two lemons were placed under its wheels.
France’s defence minister, Florence Parly, said: “It is no coincidence that this ceremony falls on Dussehra.”
On May 28, 2023, Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated India’s new Parliament building. Adheenams, heads of Tamil Shaiva monasteries, handed him the Sengol, a ceremonial scepter. He installed it in the Lok Sabha chamber, “right next to the Speaker’s chair.”
On September 19, 2023, the old Parliament building was given a new name, Samvidhan Sadan, the House of the Constitution.
The Constitution allowed English to remain an official language for 15 years after 1950. The Official Languages Act of 1963 provided that, after that period, “the English language may, as from the appointed day, continue to be used in addition to Hindi.”
An amendment of 1967 provided that the use of English would not end until a resolution to that effect was passed. The act “effectively made English a permanent official language of India,” Wikipedia notes.
India’s national calendar, based on the Saka era, was “adopted from 22 March 1957 along with the Gregorian calendar” for official purposes. Its official uses include the Gazette of India and the news broadcasts of All India Radio. Its first day in official use was the first day of Chaitra, 1879, in the Saka era.
In Assam’s tea gardens, work runs on bagaan time, tea garden time. It is a schedule kept by tea planters, one hour ahead of Indian Standard Time, and it dates from the British period.
In January 2014 the Assam government announced that the whole state would switch to bagaan time, Al Jazeera reported.
On July 1, 2024, the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita replaced the Indian Penal Code of 1860. A new procedure code, the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, replaced the Code of Criminal Procedure.
Section 531 of the new procedure code saves what was already under way. If an appeal, application, trial, inquiry or investigation was pending before July 1, 2024, it continues under the old code.
For such cases, the old codes continue to apply.
On November 9, 2014, India created the Ministry of AYUSH. It grew out of a department that had been renamed the Department of AYUSH in 2003. The name stands for Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy.
In 2019, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman carried the budget papers in a bahi-khata, a traditional ledger, instead of a leather briefcase. “The tradition of briefcase, started by British, was inherited in India,” Deccan Herald wrote.
In February 2021 India presented its first paperless budget. Sitharaman carried a tablet that had been “placed inside a red cover.”
On Diwali, India’s stock exchanges hold a one-hour session called Muhurat trading. It marks the start of the new Samvat year. On October 21, 2025, the NSE and the BSE opened the session at 1:45 p.m. for the start of Samvat 2082.
Chandrayaan-3 was launched to the Moon on July 14, 2023. The day before, a team of ISRO scientists visited the Venkateswara temple at Tirupati. They took a miniature model of the spacecraft with them. ISRO’s chairman, S. Somanath, prayed at the Sri Chengalamma temple.