News Snippets
• The Gujarat government will connect over 6,000 villages by March 2006, under the e-gram project, the panchayat minister of the state informed the state assembly in the first week of April.
• The Jawaharlal Nehru International Stadium in Kochi, Kerala, which recently hosted a one-day international cricket match between India and Pakistan, was declared a non-smoking zone. Kerala was the first state to introduce a ban on smoking in public in July 1999. While the ban makes it an effective tool for the Greater Kochi development corporation (which owns the stadium) to take action against people smoking in public places, the cricket match provided an opportune moment to send the message across against smoking.
• Greenpeace has started an online signature campaign against the u nion government's move that threatens to turn Kakinada port in Andhra Pradesh into a ship-breaking yard.