Over 8.6 lakh candidates have registered for the JEE (main) January 2023 session, down by 6021 from the July 2022 session.
Male aspirants continue to dominate, accounting for over six lakh or nearly 70% of the registered candidates.
However, for the first time women account for over 30% of the candidates. It has increased from 2.5 lakh to 2.6 lakh.
Category wise, the percentage of ‘general’ candidates has dropped from last year, from 41.8% to 38.3% this time.
On the other hand, the percentage of candidates is up from 35.7% to 37.1% for the OBC category.
The highest number of candidates are from Maharashtra followed by UP and Andhra pradesh.
# Courts
Of the over four crore cases pending in lower courts in the country, about 63 lakh cases remain undecided because of non availability of counsel, according to the National judicial data grid (NJDG) as of January 20.
Atleast 78% of such cases are criminal and the rest are civil.
Uttar pradesh has the most cases pending due to this reason.
Delhi, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, UP and Bihar together account for 77% of the 63 lakh such cases.
# Sugar exports
More than 10 fold increase in ethanol production in the past nine years and over 20 times rise in sugar exports in the last six years have helped India’s sugar mills to become self reliant ans also make faster payment of dues to farmers.
The government data show that sugar cane dues for 2020-21 and 2021-22 seasons have reduced to barely 0.1% and 2% respectively.
Official details show that since 2014, sugar mills and distilleries have generated about 77000 crore from sale of ethanol to oil marketing companies.
Sugar exports have gone up from less than 50000 tonne in 2016-17 sugar season to 110 lakh tonnes in 2021-22.
# China
china reported nearly 13000 covid related deaths in hospitals between January 13 and 19.
This death toll came a week after china said that nearly 60000 people had died with covid-19 in hospitals in just over a month.