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A Village Burnt Overnight: Tears, Loss and Survival in Dhamangaon Blaze

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  Sitting amid the blackened remains of his home, 32-year-old Nikesh Gawali carefully broke open a half-melted plastic box with a screwdriver. His hands shook slightly, not out of fear, but out of hope. “I’m trying to find my daughter Aarti’s gold earrings,” he said quietly, still focused on the box. “She’s just five. I got them made recently after months of labour work.” The plastic box, warped and blackened by heat, was one of the few things left from his two-room house on the outskirts of Dhamangaon village . All around him lay ash, broken tin sheets and charred wooden beams. The walls had cracked under the heat and the front room’s tin roof had caved in completely. What remained was a blackened debris all around - almost nothing to suggest a home once stood there. Nikesh earns his living as an agricultural labourer, like many in the village. Work is uncertain and depends on the season. Those earrings weren’t just jewellery - they were a small dream, a reward for his hard work,...
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Mahatma Gandhi’s spectacles theft case: CID still clueless

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Mahatma Gandhi eyeglasses stolen from Sevagram ashram
THE missing glasses of Mahatma Gandhi from Sevagram Ashram, Wardha, are providing a clear picture of the State Criminal Investigation Department’s inefficiency in cracking the theft. Three years on, since the spectacles went missing, it has remained a wild-goose chase for the CID with no breakthrough in sight.

The Mahatma’s glasses went missing from the Sevagram Ashram in November 2010 and the theft came to light on June 14, 2011. The probe was handed over to the State CID. Since then the department is groping in dark with no results.
Additional Superintendent of Police (CID) Ratan Singh Yadav has maintained that the CID was still probing the case. Till date the department has managed to seize a laptop from a woman inmate of the Ashram but yet to study the contents on the hard disk.

The woman got the laptop as a gift from someone. During investigation cops found that an important file had been deleted. They sent hard disk of the laptop for Chemical Analysis (CA) to recover the file. “The chemical analysis had recovered the file and forwarded it to CID Nagpur. However, the file sent was corrupt. We have again called for the correct file from CA,” Yadav said.

Speculations are rife that the historic piece of Mahatma Gandhi was sold in grey market for around Rs 4 to 5 crore. The CID officers promptly denied the reports but failed to elaborate on the angles they were probing apart from the seized laptop.

Sources said that CID was doing only paper work as they did not have any concrete evidence. The then Superintendent of Police Yashasvi Yadav, too, had investigated the case and made many visits to Wardha. But despite interrogating many people from the Ashram they failed to get any clue.

Incidentally, September 23 was the 80th anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi’s arrival to Sevagram Ashram. He stayed here from 1933 and 1946. To mark the occasion the National Executive meeting of the All India Youth Congress also got under way on Monday, in the Ashram premises.
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