When Scindia met aunt Maya Singh at MP poll booth and predicted her vote

On Wednesday, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Congress Member of Parliament from Madhya Pradesh, bumped into his great aunt as he emerged from a polling booth in Gwalior, where he had gone to cast his vote. As Scindia stepped out, he came face to face with Madhya Pradesh cabinet minister Maya Singh. Photographers had a gala time clicking the duo in a warm embrace. Scindia was heard telling Singh, who had been denied a ticket by the Bharatiya Janata Party this time, "I know who you would be voting for." Singh smiled at him but was later heard saying that everyone must fulfil his/her responsibility. Singh, who was elected from the Gwalior East constituency in 2013, is a maternal aunt of Scindia's father, the late Madhavrao Scindia.

 
A moving commentary
 
On Wednesday, as Madhya Pradesh went to the polls, a "quotation" to shift homes, purportedly raised by Agarwal Packers and Movers, went viral on social media. According to the post, Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan had requested an estimate to move his household goods from the Madhya Pradesh C.M. House in Shyamla Hills, Bhopal, to Gondia, Maharashtra (Chouhan's wife Sadhna Singh hails from Gondia). According to the “quotation”, a princely sum of ~1.5 million was to be paid to move 16 trucks, 11 mini trucks and a “cash van with armed guards” to the said destination. The post turned out to be fake. Last heard, Agarwal Packers and Movers was pursuing a complaint with the cyber crime branch of the Bhopal police.

 

Digging holes and filling them
 
The hullabaloo over Rahul Gandhi's gotra and former chief economic advisor Arvind Subramanian's portrayal of demonetisation almost drowned out an interesting observation about the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) by Bharatiya Janata Party MP Varun Gandhi in his new book A Rural Manifesto. In the book released on Wednesday, Gandhi described the UPA scheme as a “major central scheme with incentives for states to encourage it”. Gandhi wrote, “While some groups have made unsubstantiated claims that MGNREGA involves digging trenches and then filling them up... the reality has been different.” Nearly three years ago, in a statement in Parliament, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had dismissed the scheme as a “living monument of UPA’s failure” and had questioned the wisdom of the government in sending “people to dig holes”.