The Delhi Metro Rail Corporation was set up in 1995, with E. Sreedharan as managing director. Construction began on October 1, 1998. The first phase, a network of 59 stations, was completed in 2006, on budget and almost three years ahead of schedule.
Business Week called it “nothing short of a miracle.”
On September 21, 2010, shortly before the Commonwealth Games in Delhi, a footbridge under construction near the main stadium collapsed. Twenty-three workers were injured. Team Scotland called the athletes’ village “unsafe and unfit for human habitation.” Mike Fennell of the Commonwealth Games Federation said it was “seriously compromised.”
At the close of the Games, Fennell said the organizers had “delivered a truly outstanding event.” He added: “our plan B is Delhi, and Delhi has performed.”
In January 2013, a team from Harvard went to the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad to “map the metabolism of the city.” The city had been built for the festival. It was roughly the size of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Planners expected upwards of 30 million visitors on the main bathing days. The city was to exist for 55 days.
On April 5, 1961, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru laid the foundation stone of the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada. On September 17, 2017, Prime Minister Narendra Modi dedicated the dam to the nation.
Aadhaar is India’s national identity number. The first one was issued on September 29, 2010, to Ranjna Sonwane in Tembhali, a village in Nandurbar district, Maharashtra.
By April 2016, more than one billion Aadhaar numbers had been issued, according to the minister Ravi Shankar Prasad.
“Salim and Javed were the first to hand in bound scripts along with detailed narration on every single film they wrote.” Scroll.in wrote this of the screenwriting pair Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar.
The word first carries the point. It implies that, before them, a complete script was not the rule in Hindi film.
Atal Bihari Vajpayee became Prime Minister in March 1998. On March 28, he asked for preparations for a nuclear test. On May 11, India detonated three devices at Pokhran, and two more on May 13.
American spy satellites had detected test preparations in 1996. This time the army’s 58th Engineer Regiment prepared the site. It worked mostly at night and put the equipment back in place each day, so that nothing seemed to have moved.
On November 12, 2023, part of the Silkyara tunnel in Uttarakhand collapsed. Forty-one workers were trapped behind the rubble. An American auger machine drilled toward them, then ran into obstacles and stopped.
A company involved in the rescue approached Wakeel Hassan, who leads a team of rat-hole miners. Twelve men who specialized in rat-hole mining were flown in from Delhi. They cleared the last stretch by hand. All 41 workers were rescued on November 28.
In April 2021, during the second wave of Covid-19, Indians appealed on social media for hospital beds, oxygen and medicines. Many tagged B.V. Srinivas, president of the Indian Youth Congress, in their appeals. “We have received more than 40000 requests and enquiries about hospital beds, oxygen, Remdesivir and plasma,” he told Outlook on April 16.
According to The Week, his network of 1,000 volunteers worked with Covid centers across the states.
In August 2018, floods covered large parts of Kerala. The state’s Fisheries Minister, J. Mercykutty Amma, said that fishermen in 669 mechanized country boats had rescued 65,000 people.
“We shared location information on WhatsApp,” one of them, Rony Thomas, told ThePrint.