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INBRIEF
Home minister Rajnath
Singh flew into a delicate
situation in Islamabad on
Wednesday as his
touchdown for a Saarc
meeting coincided with
Kashmir-linked barbs by
Nawaz Sharif. The Pakistan
Prime Minister told his
diplomats that “Kashmir
is witnessing a new wave of
freedom movement”.
New Delhi refrained from a
sharp response, sticking to
the convention of not
criticising a country hosting
its minister. Sources said
Singh may include in his
speech on Thursday indirect
references to supporters
of terror without
directly naming any
country. (PTI picture)
Cabinet clears
traffic fines
■Steep increase in fines for
drink-driving, hit-and-run
cases and driving without
licence has been proposed in
amendments to the motor
vehicle act cleared by the
cabinet on Wednesday.
NATION P4
West Indies fight back
■A resolute West Indies wiped
out a 304-run deficit to fight
back in a Test that India dominated for four days. After
slumping to 48 for 4 in their
second innings, the West
Indies reached 333 for 6 with
24 overs to play out. Spinner
Roston Chase scored a
maiden century after taking
five wickets.
SPORT
K.P. NAYAR
Aug. 3: As many as 282 passengers flying on Emirates
airline from Thiruvananthapuram to Dubai today
morning went from the fire
into the frying pan — not
the proverbial other way
round — when their flight
EK521 crash-landed on the
tarmac of the Gulf airline’s exclusive home base
hub of Terminal 3.
Only in the Gulf can it
happen at the end of a close
shave for passengers — there
were no fatalities but for a
firefighter — that nearly half
of them had to be provided
treatment for their soles that
suffered burns from the
scorching ground after being
evacuated from a smokefilled aircraft cabin to the outside temperature of 48°C.
Passengers said they were
mostly relaxed during their
three-hour-odd journey and
had taken off their shoes or
sandals to literally put their
feet up with a beer or another
drink for which Dubai’s flag
carrier is famous.
But when flight EK521 hit
the ground with a thud and
smoke started billowing from
BALL OF FIRE
Midriff charred, the Emirates plane lies crippled on the tarmac after a part of it burst into flames at Dubai International airport. (Reuters) ■See Page 6
the fore of the plane, the passengers were told to exit through
evacuation chutes on the aft of
the Boeing 777-300 aircraft.
The drill for such emergency evacuation prohibits passengers from retrieving their
hand baggage or carrying any
belongings lest it hinder the
quick passage through the
chute.
In the case of EK521, timely evacuation was critical.
Within seconds after the last
passenger had run for life
away from the emergency
chute, a part of the plane ex-
ploded from the flames that
had engulfed the front of the
aircraft as it hit the ground.
For many passengers who
made good their escape without the time needed to wear
their shoes, the melting tarmac in the scorching summer
heat of the Gulf was too much
to bear. The more they ran
across the tarred ground, the
more their feet got burnt.
Personnel at the airport
clinic said they treated more
than 100 passengers for burnt
skin caused by the sun’s merciless toll in the afternoon.
Sources at Dubai International Airport said preliminary investigations were focusing on why the plane’s landing gear was not lowered as it
hit the ground. Assessment by
ground safety personnel, who
are not allowed to speak on
record, is that had the aircraft’s wheels and the rest of
its landing gear been in place,
EK521 would have had a normal landing and the mishap
could have been avoided.
Passengers said the cabin
crew had announced the
flight’s normal descent and
British-era bridge on Mumbai-Goa
highway collapses, mystery over
buses with 22 people and cars
they were instructed to wear
seat belts as usual prior to
landing. However, only seconds before the plane hit the
ground, the pilot decided to
abort the landing and attempted to ascend to the skies to
make a second landing effort.
For reasons that will now
be investigated, the plane
failed to take off and reach the
height needed to attempt a second landing. The decision to
abort the initial landing and
make a second effort may be
the reason why the aircraft’s
wheels were not lowered.
JAIDEEPHARDIKAR
Nepal’s new PM
Anti-defection law
■The Supreme Court has refused to revisit its two-decade-old verdict on the anti-defection law holding that an
elected or nominated Parliament member of a political
party is bound by its whip
even after expulsion. The court was hearing a plea filed
by politician Amar Singh.
It is time to
put country first
before party
MEG WHITMAN
Republican fundraiser and
Hewlett Packard CEO who has
endorsed Hillary Clinton
The old bridge ends abruptly after the collapse, leaving behind a yawning cavity over the swirling Savitri river, while vehicles ply
on the neighbouring new bridge on Wednesday
GST kiss and a quick kick
OUR SPECIALCORRESPONDENT
New Delhi, Aug. 3: India today moved a
step closer to a goods and services tax
(GST) — touted as the biggest tax reform
since Independence — after the Rajya
Sabha passed a constitutional amendment bill that aims to bind its 29 states
into a $2-trillion pan-India common market with 1.3 billion consumers.
The voting on the legislation, which
seeks to create a GST council that will deliberate and recommend a uniform, three-tier rate covering all goods and services across the country, was “unanimous”
after the AIADMK staged a walkout just
before the vote was taken.
Tamil Nadu, led by the Jayalalithaaheaded AIADMK, was the only state to
resolutely set its face against the GST on
the ground that the legislation was unconstitutional and violated the fiscal autonomy of the states.
At the end of a seven-hour debate on
the contours of a tax reform that will take
final shape only after the Centre and the
states pass subsidiary legislation, possibly in the next three months, a deep wrangle broke out between Congress leaders
led by P. Chidambaram and finance minister Arun Jaitley over the latter’s refusal
to give an assurance that he would not
Jaitley being fed sweets by Ravi
Shankar Prasad after the passage
of the bill. (PTI) ■See Business
move the subsidiary legislation as a
money bill.
“We will fully comply with the Constitution and the various precedents,” Jaitley said, adding that he could not give such
an assurance without seeing the text of
the draft bill that will be prepared by the
empowered committee of state finance
ministers which has been piloting the tax.
The Congress fears that the government will move the legislation as a money
bill, which would only require a vote in
the Lok Sabha. The party wants it to be
moved as a financial bill that would need
to be debated and voted on in both Houses.
“We cannot have a situation where
one House debates and the other House
votes,” Chidambaram said.
The Centre is hoping to bring the GST
AS TOLD TO
ANANTHAKRISHNAN G.
Aug. 3: A long stretch of a British-era
bridge on the busy Mumbai-Goa
highway was swept away last night,
triggering an intense search to establish whether a bus carrying 22 people
and eight other vehicles had fallen
into the river.
Maharashtra police said there
was no trace of the buses or other vehicles till this evening.
Constructed by the British in
1928, the bridge ran across the Savitri
river at Mahad in Raigad, some
170km south of Mumbai. Even after a
parallel bridge was built in 2001, the
old one continued to be in use because of the heavy traffic on the highway.
“The arches on which the bridge
rests are all interconnected. If one
arch falls, the entire bridge collapses
like a pack of cards,” an official said.
“Three years ago, the bridge had been
reinforced with crash bearings but
the agency that built the bridge had
communicated to the government in
the late 1990s that the bridge was past
its life,” he added.
The Indian Navy and the Coast
Guard have deployed search teams,
along with over a hundred rescuers of
the National Disaster Response Force
and local police, across an 18km
stretch from the bridge to Harihareshwar where the river meets the
Arabian Sea. Helicopters and at least
one all-weather aircraft have also
joined the search.
Witnesses have told the administration that two buses might have
been swept away. Two buses scheduled to reach Mumbai this morning
did not do so. Neither the drivers and
conductors nor the passengers could
be reached on their phones, local
television reports quoted relatives
and transport officials as saying.
Witnesses said eight private vehicles, including a couple of cars, also
fell into the river.
Vasant Kumar, a mechanic who
lives near the site, told a Marathi TV
channel that the old bridge collapsed
around 11.30pm. The bus drivers may
not have realised that three-fourths of
the bridge had collapsed, he added.
The Maharashtra government
has announced a structural and safety audit of 36 British-era bridges on
the Mumbai-Goa highway.
Budget hotel helps out Sonia
into force from April 1, 2017 — more than
a decade after Chidambaram had floated
the idea in his budget speech back in 2006.
At the start of the debate, the Congress backed down from its rigid insistence
on the inclusion of a GST rate cap in the
constitutional amendment bill but demanded an assurance from Jaitley that it would be clearly spelt out in the subsidiary
legislation.
The Congress has been pushing for a
standard rate of around 18 per cent, drawing on the recommendation made by a
panel headed by chief economic adviser
Arvind Subramanian in a report submitted last December.
But Jaitley refused to relent on this as
well. “We will try and keep the rate as low
as possible. The possibility of lowering it
also exists,” Jaitley said.
The finance minister said the large concertina of taxes, levies and cesses at the
Centre and the states stack up to about 27
per cent. Last year, the National Institute
of Public Finance and Policy, a government-funded research institution, had fixed
the revenue neutral rate at 26 per cent.
(Revenue neutral rate is a notional single
rate which, when applied to all goods and
services, keeps the revenue same as it was
earlier.)
CONTINUED ON PAGE 4
▼
■Indian officials said more
than 6,200 of the workers stranded in Saudi Arabia had
been employed by troubled
construction firm Saudi
Oger, a conglomerate owned
by the family of former
Lebanese Prime Minister
Saad al-Hariri.
NATION P5
Passengers had praise for
the 18 crew members whose
swift and textbook-style evacuation procedures helped save
lives. Ground personnel also
acted efficiently to avoid fatalities.
Emirates chairman Sheikh Ahmed Bin Saeed Al-Maktoum, uncle of the Dubai ruler,
appeared on video and comforted the passengers, stressing that their safety and wellbeing were the airline’s priority, although he curiously described the crash as “an operational incident”.
Abraham Thomas, an
exporter from Kerala who
flew to Dubai by the Emirates
plane that caught fire on
Wednesday, recounts:
The touchdown at Dubai
was normal. Looking out,
I noticed that the right
engine of the aircraft was
on fire and had separated
from the body. Everybody
was panicking. The Dubai
runway is quite long and
the plane, which seemed
to have lost control by
then, kept taxiing for
around five minutes. By
then the cabin lights had
gone off and the inside
was filled with smoke.
When the aircraft came
to a halt, the emergency
chutes opened and we all
escaped. We ran for our
lives on the runway and
heard a loud explosion after
a few minutes. Looking
back, I saw the right wing
flying off and the plane
turning into a ball of fire.
MISSING
■Madras High Court has directed the Tamil Nadu government to pay Rs 10 lakh as compensation to a bank employee who lost an eye in a
stone-pelting incident on the
eve of a DMK bandh to protest party chief M. Karunanidhi’s arrest in 2001.
NATION P5
Saudi Indians
www.telegraphindia.com
But for burnt soles, 300 aboard
flight from Kerala safe after
hard landing and fire in Dubai
Bandh compensation
■Nepal’s Parliament on Wednesday elected Prachanda,
who led a decade-long insurgency that toppled a feudal
monarchy, as the country’s
new Prime Minister, a week
after K.P. Oli stepped down
to avoid a no-confidence
motion.
FOREIGN P2
XXCM
SPG
knocks,
master key
opens
PIYUSH SRIVASTAVA
Varanasi, Aug. 3: Room no.
102 on the ground floor of
Hotel Modern had not been
empty. A personal guest of the owner was
checked in. But such was the urgency when
Sonia Gandhi took ill yesterday during the
Varanasi roadshow that it was thrown open
for her.
The guest had not been in around 4.30pm
when Sonia initially dropped by to use the
washroom. But told that she had complained
of weakness and needed a room, Surendra
Singh, the owner of the budget hotel in
Varanasi’s Lahurabir area, brought out the
master key.
“It is the nearest room from the entrance
of the hotel. That was the reason the Special
Protection Group asked us to open it. Sonia
walked into the hotel by herself. But while
leaving, she was helped by her security per-
Hotel Modern in Varanasi
sonnel,” a hotel employee told The Telegraph.
Sonia, who was last night taken to the
Army Research and Referral Hospital in
Delhi, was today shifted to Sir Ganga Ram
Hospital in the capital. She is “dehydrated
but stable” and is “advised rest”, a medical
bulletin said. (See Page 4)
The room where Sonia spent about two
hours yesterday before taking the flight back
to Delhi had been barely 10ft x 12 ft. A double
bed, two chairs and a table and a cupboard
would have eaten up some space although
Hotel Modern’s rooms are described as “spacious” on the website, Travelguru. The room
also had a 4ft x 6ft attached washroom.
„ FOREIGN 2 „ NATION 4-6 „ OPINION 8-9 „ BUSINESS 10 „ SPORT 11-14 „ METRO 15-18
CONTINUED ON PAGE 4
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36 PAGES