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.”
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.
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.
A team of economists followed 822 people in Delhi who set out to get a driver’s license. “More than 70% of the participants in our study who obtained a license hired an agent.” Seventy percent of the participants reported getting a permanent license without taking the mandatory practical test at the Regional Transport Office.
The study, by Marianne Bertrand, Simeon Djankov, Rema Hanna and Sendhil Mullainathan, was published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
In Khosla Ka Ghosla (2006), directed by Dibakar Banerjee, Kamal Khosla spends his savings on a plot of land in South Delhi. A builder, Khurana, has it taken over by squatters. The family appeals to the police, lawyers, ministers and social workers, and gets nowhere.
Friends then plan a con. A theater group plays an industrialist from Dubai with land to sell. Khurana pays an advance in cash, and the Khoslas use his money to pay him off.
In 2020, Transparency International published its Global Corruption Barometer for Asia. India had the highest rate of citizens using personal connections to get public services, 46 percent. It also had the highest bribery rate, 39 percent.
In March 2020, during the Covid-19 lockdown, Aslam Chaudhury ran a kitchen for hungry workers from the mosque in Kalu Sarai, Delhi. It made 600 to 700 food packets a day. He needed cooking vessels. “The langar is shut, so I asked them if I could borrow their vessels,” he told The Caravan. The Gurdwara Shri Singh Sabha in the same village lent the vessels and sent two cooks.
On January 22, 2024, the idol of Ram Lalla was consecrated in the new temple at Ayodhya. The auspicious moment lasted 84 seconds, from 12:29:08 to 12:30:32. Pandit Ganeshwar Shastri Dravid of Kashi had fixed it.
Some parents planned births for the same day. At one hospital in Surat, doctors performed more than 22 cesarean deliveries, “all mothers choosing this date for their babies’ arrival.”
The Capability Maturity Model of Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute rates how mature a company’s software processes are. Level 5 is the highest. In January 2003, Business Today counted 78 companies in the world assessed at Level 5. Fifty-four of them were Indian companies or the Indian operations of multinationals.
In December 2001, CIOL reported that Wipro Technologies was the first company in the world to reach Level 5 of the People CMM, a version of the model for managing people.
Infosys trains its new engineering graduates at its Global Education Center in Mysore before they start work. The center can train close to 15,000 trainees at the same time. By 2012, more than 100,000 graduates had completed its Foundation Programme there. Infosys calls it the world’s largest corporate education program.