Missing Chinese Woman: A spy story that never was!
Patna (PTI): Mysterious Chinese woman suspected of spying on the Dalai Lama screamed media outlets in Bihar on the day His Holiness began his annual discourses at Bodh Gaya, returning to the pilgrim town after a gap of two years.
As the word went out that police has released sketches of Song Xiaolan, gaunt and scalp covered with closely cropped hair, along with her passport and visa numbers, headline hunters could have been excused for thinking that they had found something "big".
However, after a thorough investigation, police found that it was a simple case of a lady who had inadvertantly overstayed in the country on an expired visa.
"She has been slapped with a Leave India notice following visa violation. We are going to hand her over to the authorities concerned for repatriation", said J S Gangwar, Additional Director General of Police (Headquarters), as he sought to ward off queries from journalists who were refusing to believe that it was a case of much ado about nothing.
The Nobel Peace Prize winner, after all, remains a persona non grata in China, a country with which India has along standing border dispute. Security concerns accompany the messenger of peace wherever he goes ever since he escaped Tibet in 1959 after Chinese bloodily put down an uprising in the `Roof of the World'. His visit to Bodh Gaya a few years ago was marked by a low-intensity blast carried out by a Bangladesh-based terror outfit.
Nonetheless, a statement issued by the Gaya police makes it amply clear that Song was never suspected of espionage, leave alone terrorist activities, though she is evidently not a regular traveller from abroad either, landing on Indian soil for mundane reasons.
According to the Gaya police, the woman was self-willed enough to have fallen in love with spirituality, despite having been born in an avowedly atheist country, and she arrived in the land of the Buddha, way back in October, 2019 and simply forgot that visas are things of the world, governed by laws laid down by nations.
According to the police, she was supposed to have stayed for not more than three months. She, however, has stayed back for more than three years. In the meantime, she briefly visited Nepal, apparently on a spiritual quest, where she befriended a local woman and, with her, returned to India.
The two women, both of whom were picked up by the police from a guest house in Bodh Gaya, have confessed to having settled down in Mc Leodganj, a town in Dharamshala district of Himachal Pradesh, often called a "mini Tibet", apparently driven by a desire to be close to the Dalai Lama.
They came to Bodh Gaya on December 22, the date on which the Dalai Lama also arrived on his annual retreat, but by the time the police had been sounded off by the foreign department that Xiaolan was a persona non grata.
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India is the place for large-scale organic production, says Commerce Secretary
Nuremberg (PTI): India is the place for large-scale organic production and the country is keen to collaborate with the EU to strengthen this ecosystem to cater to rising demands, Commerce Secretary Rajesh Agrawal said here on Tuesday.
Agrawal also said that India's organic products exports have grown threefold over the last 10 years, and the government now aims to triple them again over the next five years.
"India is the place" to serve the world as a good organic food basket, he said, adding that India has 150.3 million hectares of agricultural land under cultivation.
He said that the organic ecosystem is growing very fast in the country, as today, 3 per cent of India's cultivation is organic.
In India, 4.7 million hectares of land is under organic cultivation, with 2.4 million farmers practising it, and it is only increasing by the day, he said.
The Secretary was speaking at the inauguration of Biofach 2026. About 100 exhibitors from 20 Indian states, including Assam, Meghalaya, and Kerala, are here to showcase their organic food products at the world's leading trade fair Biofach show (February 10-13).
He informed that India is emerging as a credible supplier of organic food, both within India and outside.
"I see this happening in a much faster manner. So if world needs the state for organic production, I think India is the place, and we like to work with all of you to see how we can improve the Indian organic food ecosystem to serve both the Indian rising demand within India and also the rising demand in two of our biggest markets," he said.
He called for creating credibility around organic foods. There is a need to ensure trust and credibility around the certification of these products.
India started with the national programme for organic production way back in 2001 and that was designed to adopt the international standards of organic goods.
"And now we are bringing in cooperatives in a big way," he said, adding that cooperatives can bring in and aggregate farmers to create good, viable organic ecosystem in various villages across the country.
