Happy Ugadi and Gudi Padwa! Ugadi and Gudi Padwa are regional new year festivities, celebrated annually in India on the first day of the month of Chaitra. This year, the day falls on 22 March. The new year is celebrated as ‘Ugadi’, in Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana and in Maharashtra and Goa, it is celebrated as ‘Gudi Padwa‘.
Pujari Anitha Bai from Kurnool district, Andhra Pradesh, was born without hands. But that never stopped the seventeen-year-old from pursuing her dreams. Anitha recently appeared to write her Intermediate second-year exams by using her feet. She trained herself years ago to write with her feet. Anitha secured a 9.0 GPA in her 10th exam and wants to become a government officer.
As the first woman entrepreneur in her family and as a partition migrant, Sarla Ahuja started her venture, ‘Shahi Exports’, with 5000 rupees in Delhi, in 1974. Today, Shahi Exports is among the nation’s largest apparel manufacturers, with an annual revenue of Rs 8,000 crore. The 87-year-old has established 51 factories across eight Indian states including Haryana and Karnataka. Her company works with large retailers across the world, such as Nike and Walmart, in North America, Europe, and Australia.
Inspired by John Lennon’s song Imagine, friends Melisha Noronha, Vinod Lobo, Nitin Kumar and Vignesh, started ‘Imagine Trust’ in 2013, to donate pre-loved clothes i.e., clothes loved by someone before being offered for sale, to the poor every week. Through their initiative, the four friends collected pre-loved clothes from people willing to donate. The clothes are sold just for Re 1, and the trust has benefited around 10,000 families so far.
Neeru Yadav, the sarpanch of Longheer village, Rajasthan, is helping around 20 young girls in the village to make a career in Hockey. After becoming the sarpanch in 2020, Neeru used her sarpanch’s salary of two years and bought kits, sticks and clothes for the young female hockey players. Neeru personally arranged for the girls to play at Singhania University, located eight kilometres away from the village and appointed a coach for them.
The Kagaznagar and Asifabad forests in the Kumarmbheem Asifabad district in Telangana, is a home to a variety of birds and wild animals. To protect wildlife and to increase water resources for the birds and animals, the forest officials are taking measures to fill natural water bodies and saucer pits using solar pumps, during the dry months of April and May.
Surekha Yadav, Asia’s first woman loco pilot, became the first woman to operate the newly-introduced Vande Bharat Express train, on 13 March, 2023. Yadav piloted the semi-high-speed train between Solapur station and Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus (CSMT) in Mumbai and the train reached CSMT five minutes before the scheduled arrival. She became India’s first female train driver in 1988.
This year, Asia’s largest tulip garden in Srinagar would be open for visitors on 19 March, 2023. The garden has become one of the major tourist attractions and has advanced tourism in Kashmir, since its inauguration in 2007. Inam–ul-Rehman, the garden’s in–charge, said that this year the garden will have 16 lakh tulips of 68 varieties, including four new varieties.
Sleep is one of the most fundamental physiological needs of humans. World Sleep Day is observed every year on 17 March, to create awareness about sleep-related disorders such as insomnia and sleep apnea, and to highlight the importance of having healthy sleep habits. This year, the theme, ‘Sleep is Essential for Health’, is created to emphasise how critical sleep is for maintaining our physical and mental health.
To reduce the amount of plastic waste, Anish Malpani from Mumbai, came up with an innovative idea to make the world’s first recycled sunglasses from discarded packets of chips. The entrepreneur said that the sunglasses are light in weight, UV polarised, durable, and bendy. He added that they use the 10 percent of their sales to keep children of waste-pickers in school.
