A tailor by day and butcher by night, Bhopal man killed 33
BHOPAL: During the day Adesh Khamra stitched clothes, hunched over his sewing machine in a small shop on the fringes of Bhopal. In the night, as he tossed in bed, consumed by visions of deadly crimes that he wanted to commit, he perhaps saw himself switching the needle for an axe, the thread into a hangman's noose.
Then the killings started. Sometime around 2010. The first one in Amravati, the other in Nashik. Soon, bodies started popping up everywhere in MP, some even in Maharashtra, UP and Bihar. There was one element that connected the murders. All the victims were truck drivers and their helpers. But no one thought the quiet, affable tailor from Mandideep could have been behind the brutality.
Last week, when the local police finally nabbed Khamra, they were stunned he admitted to 30 killings. On Tuesday, he said he had killed three more. At 33 serial strikes, that would make him one of India's deadliest killers, behind the likes of Raman Raghav, who was charged with slaughtering 42, Surendra Koli and the Stoneman of Kolkata. Khamra, who was arrested from the jungles of Sultanpur in UP by a daring woman cop after a three-day chase last week, "was admitting to murders so rapidly" that the raiding team said it was struggling to keep up with the flow of information.
‘He killed drivers to give them salvation’
It was Bhopal city SP Bittu Sharma — a taekwondo black belt and Asian Games bronze medalist in judo — who took Khamra down at gunpoint in the dead of the night. Neither she nor SP Lodha Rahul Kumar, who headed investigations into two recent murders of truckers, had any clue then that they possibly had one of India’s most notorious serial killers in their custody. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime case,” said Lodha.
Co-accused Jaykaran has told police that whenever they asked him why he killed the drivers, he would laugh and say he is granting them salvation. “They lead hard lives,” he would laugh. “I am giving them mukti, freeing them from pain.”
When a TOI team visited Mandideep, stunned friends and relatives said it was unbelievable that they had lived next to a monster all this while. “He was a quiet man, well behaved. There is no way anyone will accept he has the blood of so many on his hands,” said a neighbor.
Bhopal DIG Dharmendra Choudhary said Khamra, 48 now, could put up a disarming show of warmth and friendliness. He used this to befriend truckers and trap them. While his men looted the cargo, he would strangle the drivers with a length of rope. Occasionally, he used poison to silence his victims.
The modus operandi was chillingly effective — ensnare truckers over drinks, drug them, murder them, strip them of every bit of clothing that could lead to their identification, and dump bodies under culverts or on hilly roads.
This way, bodies would turn up in states ranging from MP to Maharashtra, UP, Bihar and Jharkhand, with police struggling to join the dots. “That is what makes this gang so deadly. We don’t know how many more cold cases will be traced back to them,” said an officer interrogating Khamra.
Talking to Khamra is quite unsettling, police officers involved in the probe said. He shows no remorse. “And he remembers every little detail about everyone he has killed. The victim’s last meal, where they ate, what they wore, where and how he was killed and where exactly the body was dumped. The details are bloodcurdling. In postmortem reports, the injuries were exactly where he had dealt the blows,” added a police officer.
For police, there were more startling disclosures in store. Khamra was most likely influenced by a dreaded killer he called uncle, a man whose name was Ashok Khamra. Ashok himself had admitted to 100 trucker murders when he was arrested in 2010, police said. Ashok drugged his police escort while being brought to Bhopal by train and escaped. He hasn’t been seen since.
In the close-knit Khamra community — a group of hard working, educated people whose forefathers came as refugees from Pakistan — Ashok’s notoriety is a matter of shame. So is Khamra’s now.
courtesy : timesofindia.indiatimes.com
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Single higher education regulator bill tabled in LS; Oppn flags ‘centralisation,' JPC likely
New Delhi: A bill to set up a 13-member body to regulate institutions of higher education was introduced in the Lok Sabha on Monday.
Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan introduced the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan Bill, which seeks to establish an overarching higher education commission along with three councils for regulation, accreditation, and ensuring academic standards for universities and higher education institutions in India.
Meanwhile, the move drew strong opposition, with members warning that it could weaken institutional autonomy and result in excessive centralisation of higher education in India.
The Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan Bill, 2025, earlier known as the Higher Education Council of India (HECI) Bill, has been introduced in line with the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020.
The proposed legislation seeks to merge three existing regulatory bodies, the University Grants Commission (UGC), the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), and the National Council for Teacher Education (NCTE), into a single unified body called the Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan.
At present, the UGC regulates non-technical higher education institutions, the AICTE oversees technical education, and the NCTE governs teacher education in India.
Under the proposed framework, the new commission will function through three separate councils responsible for regulation, accreditation, and the maintenance of academic standards across universities and higher education institutions in the country.
According to the Bill, the present challenges faced by higher educational institutions due to the multiplicity of regulators having non-harmonised regulatory approval protocols will be done away with.
The higher education commission, which will be headed by a chairperson appointed by the President of India, will cover all central universities and colleges under it, institutes of national importance functioning under the administrative purview of the Ministry of Education, including IITs, NITs, IISc, IISERs, IIMs, and IIITs.
At present, IITs and IIMs are not regulated by the University Grants Commission (UGC).
Government to refer bill to JPC; Oppn slams it
The government has expressed its willingness to refer it to a joint committee after several members of the Lok Sabha expressed strong opposition to the Bill, stating that they were not given time to study its provisions.
Responding to the opposition, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju said the government intends to refer the Bill to a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) for detailed examination.
Congress Lok Sabha MP Manish Tewari warned that the Bill could result in “excessive centralisation” of higher education. He argued that the proposed law violates the constitutional division of legislative powers between the Union and the states.
According to him, the Bill goes beyond setting academic standards and intrudes into areas such as administration, affiliation, and the establishment and closure of university campuses. These matters, he said, fall under Entry 25 of the Concurrent List and Entry 32 of the State List, which cover the incorporation and regulation of state universities.
Tewari further stated that the Bill suffers from “excessive delegation of legislative power” to the proposed commission. He pointed out that crucial aspects such as accreditation frameworks, degree-granting powers, penalties, institutional autonomy, and even the supersession of institutions are left to be decided through rules, regulations, and executive directions. He argued that this amounts to a violation of established constitutional principles governing delegated legislation.
Under the Bill, the regulatory council will have the power to impose heavy penalties on higher education institutions for violating provisions of the Act or related rules. Penalties range from ₹10 lakh to ₹75 lakh for repeated violations, while establishing an institution without approval from the commission or the state government could attract a fine of up to ₹2 crore.
Concerns were also raised by members from southern states over the Hindi nomenclature of the Bill. N.K. Premachandran, an MP from the Revolutionary Socialist Party representing Kollam in Kerala, said even the name of the Bill was difficult to pronounce.
He pointed out that under Article 348 of the Constitution, the text of any Bill introduced in Parliament must be in English unless Parliament decides otherwise.
DMK MP T.M. Selvaganapathy also criticised the government for naming laws and schemes only in Hindi. He said the Constitution clearly mandates that the nomenclature of a Bill should be in English so that citizens across the country can understand its intent.
Congress MP S. Jothimani from Tamil Nadu’s Karur constituency described the Bill as another attempt to impose Hindi and termed it “an attack on federalism.”
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