Rains pound Uttarakhand, schools to remain shut
Dehradun, Sep 1 : With heavy rain forecast in Uttarakhand till Monday and showers continuing in most parts on Saturday, schools have been shut down in Dehradun, Paudi, Tehri and Haridwar, an official said.
"Keeping in mind the safety of the students and teachers, all schools up to Class 12 have been shut down," an official told IANS.
Vigil has been stepped up in the state capital here, and the hill station of Nainital, Chamoli, Rudrprayag, Paudi, Champawat and Udhamsingh Nagar districts.
The state and national disaster management bodies SDRF and NDRF have been put on high alert.
The Regional Met Office has predicted that the hill state will receive heavy to very heavy rains till September 3.
Landslides have been reported from the Badrinath, Kedarnath and Yamunotri highways and trekkers have been asked to stay put at safe places.
More than 200 link roads in the hill regions are out of bounds for traffic owing to damage inflicted by continuous and heavy showers.
The Ganga river is in spate in Haridwar and is flowing near the danger mark. District authorities have asked people living in Haripurkalan, Gaziwali and Kangdi to shift to safer places.
Water entered low-lying areas in Haripurkalan as the Ganga here was flowing at 292.80 metres late on Friday after extra water was released by the Srinagar barrage. The danger mark is at 294 metres.
"We are keeping a close watch," Meera Kaintura, the district disaster management officer of Haridwar said.
This is for the first time this monsoon season that the Ganga is flowing so close to the danger mark.
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Two injuries, one DNF, a DQ as India end messy World Relays campaign
Gaborone (Botswana) (PTI): Amoj Jacob and Ragul Kumar got injured during the men's 4x400m and 4x100 races respectively as India ended their World Athletics Relays campaign in disappointment on the second day of competitions here on Sunday.
The Indian camp had high hopes of making the 2027 World Championships in the men's 4x400m relay but the team did not finish (DNF) the race as Jacob suffered cramps and pulled out of the race after taking the baton from the first leg runner Dharamveer Choudhary. Rajesh Ramesh and Vishal TK were to run in the third and fourth legs.
Those teams which could not qualify for the 2027 Beijing World Championships by reaching the final round of each of the six relay events on Saturday were given another chance in the second qualification round on Sunday.
The top two teams in each of the two heats (in all six relay events) booked the Beijing ticket on Sunday.
India will now have to try and qualify for the World Championships through the Top Lists of the World Athletics, which is a long and tedious process.
In the men's 4x100m race, third leg runner Ragul Kumar fell down the track after failing to hand over the baton inside the exchange zone to fourth leg runner Gurindervir Singh, which clearly showed the lack of coordination among the runners.
Harsh Santosh Raut and Animesh Kujur ran the first two legs.
The Indian quartet was disqualified and Kumar was seen being taken away from the Field of Play with the help of the volunteers.
It was a comedy of errors in the case of the women's 4x100m race, which saw the baton being dropped during an exchange between first leg runner Tamanna and second runner Nithya Gandhe, though the Indians finished the race in 53.09 seconds.
Gandhe started running quite a distance, but after realising that the baton was not in her hand, she turned and ran back to pick it up.
The only silver-lining for the Indian contingent was the national record time in the mixed 4x100m relay race, though the quartet of Ragul Kumar, Nithya Gandhe, Animesh Kujur and Sneha SS finished sixth in heat number two with a time of 41.35 seconds, bettering the previous national mark of 42.30 seconds set in March in Chandigarh.
The mixed 4x400m relay quartet of Theerthesh P Shetty, Kumari Saloni, Nihal William and Rashdeep Kaur ended at fifth in heat number one with a time of 3 minutes and 19.40 seconds.
On Saturday, all the five Indian relay teams had failed to make it to the respective final rounds and thus missed out on the 2027 World Championships berths.
