New Delhi: An Indian Army officer from Manipur’s Senapati district has earned praises for his bravery during clashes with Chinese troops at the Galwan Valley in Ladakh last year.
Captain Soiba Maningba Rangnamei from the 16 Bihar Regiment came under the spotlight after China released a video last week of the border standoff that took place in June last year. The clip shows the captain pushing back a Chinese PLA soldier and walking unarmed to stop Chinese troops from transgressing.
Manipur Chief Minister N. Biren Singh and Union minister Kiren Rijiju also took to Twitter recently to applaud his bravery.
He is Captain Soiba Maningba Rangnamei from Senapati District in Manipur. He lead his men from 16 Bihar in Galwan during the confrontation against the Chinese PLA. pic.twitter.com/lvCI9gKmSF
— Kiren Rijiju (@KirenRijiju) February 20, 2021
Belonging to the Maram tribe of Manipur, the Army officer did his schooling from the Sainik School, Imphal and graduated from the National Defence Academy in Pune. He passed the Joint Training Academy and was commissioned on 9 June 2018 from the Indian Military Academy in Dehradun.
Black-necked crane visits Assam for the first time, gets a new name
A pair of black-necked cranes (Grus nigricollis) were recently sighted in Assam for the first time. The birds, which are native to Tibet, were spotted on the outskirts of the Panbari range of Manas National Park in the state.
“We are so excited. It’s a major development. The black-necked crane has never been sighted in Assam. We suspect it might have flown all the way from the Tibetan Plateau,” Nilutpal Mahanta, a researcher scholar at Gauhati University told The News Mill.
Tiken Ray, a member of the Wildlife Trust of India’s field team has alerted about the spotting of these birds on 17 February. The next day, a group of researchers visited the site and confirmed the pair to be black-necked cranes.
Residents have named the bird ‘Deu Korchon’ (Deu means god and Korchon means crane) as it holds mythological importance in Buddhist culture. The black-necked cranes have three wintering sites in India, all of them in Arunachal Pradesh. But these birds had stopped coming to the Sangte and Chugh valleys in Arunachal Pradesh two years ago due to loss of habitat.
New, ‘critically endangered’ alpine plant species found in Arunachal
A group of scientists from three institutes of the country have discovered a new alpine plant species in Arunachal Pradesh.
The study, which was published in the international peer-reviewed journal Biodiversitas: Journal of biological diversity, noted the new species belongs to the genus Cremanthodium, commonly known as Himalayan sunflower.
The discovery was made by Dipankar Borah of Goalpara College, Rajeev Kumar Singh of Botanical Survey of India, and Lobsang Tashi Thungon of North Eastern Regional Institute of Science and Technology.
Named as Cremanthodium indicum, the new plant species generally flowers from July to August and is endemic to Penga-Teng Tso Lake of Tawang district in Arunachal Pradesh. The scientists have also noted that only 270 mature ‘individuals’ are left in the location and the plant has been assessed as critically endangered.
Why blue earthworms in Meghalaya mass migrate twice in a year
In a remote hamlet called Mawlyngot in the East Khasi Hills district of Meghalaya, a unique species of blue worm, identified as Perionyx macintoshi, undertake an annual migration — one uphill during spring and another downhill in autumn.
According to a report prepared by the Zoological Survey of India, the earthworms have a role to play in enriching the soil and the organic revolution unfolding in the area.
“The study on documenting the mass migration of earthworms at Mawlyngot was initiated by Ilona Jacinta Kharkongor after she came across a report about the migration in a local news channel in 2011,” Bhaskar Saikia, who has co-authored the research along with Kharkongor, has been quoted as saying. The findings were published in the latest issue of the journal Records of the Zoological Survey of India.
The researchers have said that the uphill journey of the worms coincides with the onset of monsoon, during April-May, and the downhill journey starts around September-October when the temperature and humidity drop.
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