Chandigarh, March 17 (IANS) The newly constituted legislative assembly, whose three-day session began here on Thursday, was different as most of the security guards did not recognise a few new faces who arrived for the session.
The first of the session commenced with Pro-tem Speaker Inderbir Singh Nijjar administering the oath of office and secrecy to Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann as Member of the Vidhan Sabha.
Breaking the convention, all women members were administered oath after the Chief Minister.
Thereafter, all other members were sworn in by the Speaker as members of the newly constituted Assembly district-wise in an alphabetical order.
The Chief Minister announced an anti-corruption helpline.
A day after resigning from the post of Punjab Congress chief, Navjot Singh Sidhu, who faced defeat from his stronghold Amritsar (East), supported Mann's crusade against corruption.
"The happiest man is the one from whom no one expects. Bhagwant Mann unfurls a new anti-mafia era in Punjab with a mountain of expectations, hope he rises to the occasion, brings back Punjab on the revival path with pro-people policies, best always," Sidhu said in a tweet.
Rising from the ashes like the phoenix, the Arvind Kejriwal-led Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) last week, in a maiden emphatic win, crushed the traditional players that ruled the border state of Punjab for over seven decades with its stunning victory largely by its greenhorns on 92 of the 117 seats of the legislative assembly.
The previous ruling Congress, which won 77 seats in 2017, managed to win only 18 seats with most of its stalwarts like Chief Minister Charanjit Channi and state party chief Sidhu facing humiliating defeat from their respective strongholds.
Rahim is on 21-day furlough from Sunaria jail and is camping in Gurugram. He will be getting 10 NSG security personnel for mobile security and eight security personnel for his residence security. The Haryana government's recommendation to grant the top layer security cover to the convicted sect leader comes following his request.
Many residential and industrial parts of the city faced major power outages as employees of the Electricity Department went on a three-day strike from Monday night in protest against the privatisation of the department. Most of the places have been facing snapping of power since midnight.
In a significant decision by the Guru Nanak Dev University syndicate, Professor Dr Sanjeev P. Sahni, Principal Director, Jindal Institute of Behavioural Sciences (JIBS), has been appointed as 'Professor of Eminence' for a period of five years. Dr Sahni joins an elite list of scholars extraordinaire who have been awarded the position based on their outstanding contribution to the field of academia.
The accused, identified as Nikhil Goswami, a resident of Uttar Pradesh's Ghaziabad, before being arrested by the Delhi Police from Ghaziabad, stayed for two days in Manali, Himachal Pradesh in an expensive hotel, where the room rent was Rs 25,000 per day.
A bench of Justices Sanjay Kishan Kaul and M.M. Sundresh expressed concern over the ongoing legal battle between Singh and the Maharashtra government, terming it a "messy state of affairs" and also a "very unfortunate situation".
The NCB was keeping a close vigil on the drug smuggling cases in all the election-bound states, during which as many as 14 cases related to the seizure of drugs were reported from Punjab, which went to the polls in a single phase on February 20.
