Maharashtra

Located about 700km from Pune and about 150 km north of Mangalore on the national highway no 17, the Bhatkal town in the Uttara Kannada district of Karnataka has come under the intense gaze of major investigating agencies across the country.Famous for its Navayat Muslim community with origins in Yemen, a large number of Bhakal’s residents are prosperous with close relatives in Dubai, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries from where they send money back home. The wealthy people here have…

The advanced locality management (ALM) is no more the closet community group it used to be. Going beyond the periphery of dealing with routine civic issues, the illegitimate baby of the municipal corporation ? as ALMs are called by critics ? are increasingly growing to make a larger mark in the corridors of power that deal with policy issues. A case in point is the recent informative public meeting organised by the H-West Ward Citizens’ Trust and the Bombay Catholic Sabha (BCS) with ren…

It was the night of April 5. A man in a safari suit came to the Golden Goose Bar at Grant Road. Introducing himself as excise officer RK Kadam, he started making queries and checking sales documents, a police source said.Throwing his weight around, he tried to terrorise the employees at the bar. But something warned Kadam that they were suspecting him to be a phoney. So he left the bar saying he would be back.As Kadam was getting into a taxi, a bar employee, Surat Singh Kandari, clicked …