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An Air India plane with 242 persons on board has crashed near the Ahmedabad airport. The flight was slated to travel from Ahmedabad to London but went down just five minutes after taking off at 1.38 pm.

Ahmedabad Police Commissioner GS Malik told The Hindu that 204 bodies have been recovered from the site of the crash. Forty-one injured persons have been taken to hospital, he added.

The city police also released a list of 25 persons who had been injured on account of the crash.

The aircraft was carrying 169 Indians, 53 British nationals, seven Portuguese and one Canadian. The authorities are yet to confirm the total number of deaths and injuries.

The plane was a B787 Dreamliner aircraft, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation said. The agency said that the flight gave a mayday call to the local Air Traffic Control, but when the control room called the aircraft, there was no response.

Following the crash, all flight operations were briefly suspended at the Ahmedabad airport. The services resumed after about three hours.

Dhananjay Dwivedi, the additional chief secretary of the Gujarat Health and Family Welfare Department, told reporters that the Civil Hospital students' hostel, staff quarters and other residential areas are located in the area where the plane crashed. The residents of the area were among those injured, he said.

Union Civil Aviation Minister Ram Mohan Naidu Kinjarapu said the government was “on highest alert” and that he had “directed all aviation and emergency response agencies to take swift and coordinated action”. Read on.

The Karnataka High Court on Thursday granted interim release to the marketing head of Indian Premier League team Royal Challengers Bengaluru and three others who were arrested in connection with the stampede outside Bengaluru’s Chinnaswamy Stadium. Those granted relief are Nikhil Sosale, the marketing head of Royal Challengers Bengaluru, along with event management firm DNA Entertainment Networks’ Sunil Mathew, Kiran Kumar S and Shamant NP Mavinakere.

The four men were arrested on June 6, two days after the stampede that killed 11 persons and injured more than 50.

During the hearing, Sosale and others claimed that their arrests were politically motivated and made allegedly on the directions of Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, despite the police lacking jurisdiction over the case. Read on.

India has fallen to the 131st spot out of 148 countries on the World Economic Forum’s 2025 Global Gender Gap index. In 2024, the country ranked at the 129th place out of 146 countries, while it was at 127 in 2023 and at 112th spot among 153 countries in 2020.

However, India’s overall performance improved in absolute terms by +0.3 points, the report said. The country saw a relative drop in rankings compared to the previous year due to the performance of other economies.

Countries are ranked on the index based on scores across four main subindices – economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment.

In its report released on Wednesday, the World Economic Forum stated that India had an overall parity score of 64.1%, making it one of the lowest-ranked countries in South Asia. However, the country’s overall performance improved in absolute terms by +0.3 points. Read on.

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