Congratulations to the people of Jaipur! Tomorrow, the foundation stone will be laid for the second phase of the Jaipur Metro Rail Project. A corridor will be developed connecting various residential and industrial areas. The other projects that will be dedicated to the nation are the Churu-Sadulpur and Churu-Ratangarh rail-doubling projects, the four-laning of NH-125A, Jodhpur Ring Road Section-2 (Karwar-Dangiyawas) and more.

BREAKING | Power snag hits NEET PG examination in Jaipur. Angry students protest outside Centre, demand response from NTA. India Today's Rytham Jain shares details in this #GroundReport# #ITVideo# #Rajasthan# #Jaipur# #NEETPG# | @AnjaliPandey06

#FLASH# | The NEET PG 2026 examination at Jaipur’s iON Digital Zone Sitapura has been rescheduled to September 5 after power outage concerns at the examination centre. NBEMS said the revised date will apply to all candidates allotted to the centre. #NEETPG2026# #NEETPG# #Jaipur# #NBEMS# #IndiaTodaySocial#

20 most beautiful cities in the world: 1.🇦🇺 Adelaide 2.🇪🇪 Tallinn 3.🇩🇲 Portsmouth 4.🇲🇽 San Miguel de Allende 5.🇬🇹 Antigua 6.🇸🇬 Singapore 7.🇫🇷 Paris 8.🇲🇦 Chefchaouen 9.🇹🇭 Chiang Mai 10.🇪🇬 Luxor 11.🇹🇷 Istanbul 12.🇯🇵 Kyoto 13.🇪🇸 Barcelona 14.🇿🇦 Cape Town 15.🇧🇷 Rio de Janeiro 16.🇮🇹 Florence 17.🇲🇱 Djenné 18.🇺🇸 New York City 19.🇳🇱 Amsterdam 20.🇮🇳 Jaipur According to Architectural Digest

HONOURING THE BRAVEHEARTS Certain reports circulating in sections of the media and on social media platforms have incorrectly suggested that the supreme sacrifice of six bravehearts during Operation Sindoor have been acknowledged or brought to public notice for the first time only recently. It is clarified that the nation paid homage to these fallen heroes at the earliest opportunity, well before the reports in question. During the official Press Conference held on 11 May 2025, then Director General of Military Operations (DGMO), paid solemn tribute to these brave soldiers and specifically acknowledged their sacrifice in the line of duty during Operation SINDOOR. These bravehearts were conferred with gallantry awards and this was published in the Press Release of 14 Aug 2025. This constituted a formal and National recognition of their valour and supreme sacrifice in keeping with the highest traditions of the Indian Defence Forces. Simultaneously, the Indian Army’s official social media platforms carried tributes to these bravehearts without delay. The nation’s recognition of these heroes has continued thereafter. During the Army Day Parade held at Jaipur on 15 January 2026, the Chief of the Army Staff (COAS) presented the Sena Medal (Gallantry) to the families of three of these gallant soldiers, while the Chief of Air Staff did the same on 08 Oct 2025 in a solemn ceremony, reaffirming the Defence Forces enduring commitment to honouring those who have laid down their lives in the service of the nation. With regard to the engraving of the names of fallen soldiers on the National War Memorial, it is emphasised that this sacred process is governed by an established and well-defined protocol. The Defence Forces follow these laid-down procedures with due diligence, care and reverence, commensurate with the solemnity of the honour being conferred. Any suggestion that due process was not followed is factually incorrect. It is regrettable that an avoidable and unfounded controversy has arisen around this issue. Such narratives not only misrepresent facts but also risk causing unnecessary anguish to bereaved families and detracting from the dignity owed to those who made the supreme sacrifice in service of the nation. All stakeholders are urged to exercise responsibility and restraint while reporting on matters relating to fallen soldiers and to refrain from disseminating unverified information. The Indian Defence Forces remains steadfast in its commitment to honouring every soldier who has offered supreme sacrifice in defence of the nation. The six bravehearts of Operation Sindoor are national heroes whose courage, devotion to duty and sacrifice will continue to inspire generations of Indians. Their memory shall always be honoured with the dignity, gratitude and reverence it deserves. @DefenceMinIndia @SethSanjayMP @SpokespersonMoD @MIB_India @adgpi @IAF_MCC @indiannavy @PIB_India @PTI_News @DDNewslive @airnewsalerts @ani_digital @ians_india

Culture is a key foundation of the strong India-French partnership. At ‘Bharat Innovates’, President Macron and I viewed an art exhibition by two French artists, Théophile de Bascher and Thibault de la Lance, who had recently visited Jaipur for an Art Residency.

I ran across this video a few days ago and couldn’t stop watching it. It’s about something ordinary & boring, a plastic gas lighter. But it changes how one thinks about manufacturing. That lighter in so many of our homes, holds pressurised gas. It has over 30 microscopic parts, has to pass international safety codes, & travel 10,000 miles by sea, & the total cost of doing all that, materials, labour, freight, every middleman along the way, comes to fifteen U.S cents. So how does anyone make money on this? Turns out almost the entire world’s supply comes from one place: a county called Shaodong, in China’s Hunan province. It wasn’t always there. But today, Shaodong has 114 lighter-related companies packed into the place & between them they source more than 200 different components from each other, all within a 20-kilometre radius. They supply something like seventy percent of the world’s disposable lighters. And the industry alone employs over 80,000 people locally. Nobody there is winning on cheap labour anymore. They’re winning by shaving a thousandth of a cent off the thickness of a plastic wall, or redesigning a base so a few thousand more units fit into the same shipping container. It took my thoughts back to an old professor of mine, Michael Porter. His 1980 book, Competitive Strategy, is still the 1st book most MBAs read, the one that gave the world the Five Forces and basically invented modern strategic thinking. But there’s a quieter piece of his work, on industrial clusters, that never got nearly the same attention, and it is the one that explains exactly what is happening in Shaodong. His argument was that nations and regions rarely win because of cheap inputs. They win when rival firms and specialist suppliers crowd into the same small geography for long enough that they keep pushing each other past what any one of them could manage alone. He found it in the Swiss watchmaking towns of the Jura, in the German printing press industry and in Italy’s ceramic tile and footwear districts (interestingly, it’s the SAME blueprint which built Morbi, in Gujarat, into the world’s second-largest ceramic cluster, now outproducing Italy by volume. I have posted before, about Morbi) None of these started out as giants. The neighbourhood made them giants. Which is exactly why it’s so relevant to India’s climb up the global manufacturing table I’ve also attached a slide with this post that I saw recently and which shows us breaking into the top 5 manufacturing globally. (A quick reference check told me that we may not have overtaken Korea yet, but the trajectory’s clear) That climb has happened on the back of scale: bigger plants, bigger parks, more FDI. I should declare an interest here, because the Mahindra Group set up 2 of India’s first integrated, plug-and-play business cities, in Chennai in 2002 & Jaipur in 2006. Both have been extremely successful. Chennai’s business zone alone today employs 45,000 people.. But I admit that we need to think differently. A park brings in investors and hands them a ready plot, power, water & roads A cluster is a completely different animal: hundreds of small, specialised suppliers, each obsessed with doing a tiny thing better than anyone else, feeding off each other’s presence for years until no outsider can compete with the whole. I think that’s the work ahead of us now. Not just more factories, and not just more parks. Policymakers & developers like us need to start consciously pulling as many of the inputs and resources a sector needs, the toolmakers, the component suppliers, the testing labs, the logistics specialists, into the same neighbourhood. Shaodong and Morbi both got there by accident, one town stumbling onto a way to shave a thousandth of a cent off a lighter wall, the other discovering it had the clay and, later, the gas pipeline for tiles. We don’t have the luxury of waiting for accidents anymore. We need to do it on purpose