Punjab minister seeks rescue of women stranded in Muscat
Darpan News Desk IANS, 12 May, 2023 11:22 AM
Chandigarh, May 12 (IANS) Punjab NRI Affairs Minister Kuldeep Singh Dhaliwal on Friday wrote to S. Jaishankar, Union External Affairs Minister, about Punjabi women stranded in Muscat, the capital of Oman.
He requested to taking up the matter on humanitarian grounds with the embassies to ensure the safety of these women and necessary steps be taken to bring them back to India.
"I would like to draw your kind attention about the video that had gone viral and the news in some newspapers about the Punjabi women stranded in Muscat. Most of them went there in search of employment through an agent from Hyderabad as," Dhaliwal wrote in the letter to Union External Affairs Minister.
He demanded that necessary measures may also be undertaken by the External Affairs Ministry to stop such practices by unscrupulous agents so that innocent women may not be duped.
Two Covid-19-related deaths have also been reported in the same time span. The positivity rate of the city has risen to 13.79 per cent. The number of active cases stands at 806 out of which 452 patients are being treated in home isolation.
Lakhimpur Kheri Chief Medical Officer (CMO), Santosh Gupta, said that one staff member was also found Covid-positive during a contact tracing exercise on Sunday after which the entire campus has been turned into a quarantine centre by the Health department. This is the highest number of new Covid cases reported in a district in a day this year.
During thorough search of the area on Monday, BSF troops recovered six packets, containing 6.27 kg heroin, inside a bag lying in the fields near the village. A motorcycle was also found nearby.
According to the police, a 67-year-old man had filed a complaint with the cyber police station in Shahdara district wherein he alleged that on March 18, he had received a WhatsApp video call from an unknown number in which a girl was performing some obscene act.
The accused -- 19-year-old Rohit Kumar and 26-year-old Kamal -- are residents of Sitapur. During interrogation, Rohit told police that the truck driver Harpinder, 60, originally from Faridkot district, tried to harass him sexually under the influence of alcohol.
XBB 1.16 was first found in January. However, while only two samples were found then, the number rose to 138 in February, and in March till date total 204 samples of this variant have been found through genome sequencing. The highest number of cases of this variant have been found in Maharashtra at 105, followed by Telangana 93, Karnataka 57 and Gujarat 54 as per the data.
