India has detained nearly a dozen Bangladeshi nationals attempting to cross the border as they fled escalating violence and political unrest following the ouster of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.
Border officials reported on Monday that hundreds more are gathered along the frontier, pleading for entry into India.
Sheikh Hasina, who resigned abruptly on August 5 after 15 years in power, fled to India amidst rising violence targeting minority communities in Bangladesh.
Hindus, who represent the largest minority group and are a key support base for Hasina’s Awami League, have been particularly affected, with reports of widespread attacks on their homes, temples, and businesses.
India’s Border Security Force (BSF) has arrested 11 Bangladeshis since Sunday as they attempted to cross into West Bengal.
BSF deputy inspector general Amit Kumar Tyagi stated that several hundred more remain stranded in no-man’s land along the border, seeking refuge.
Bangladesh shares a 4,000-kilometre (2,485-mile) border with India, much of which is unfenced.
The situation has also seen four Bangladeshis being “repelled” from Assam, according to the state’s chief minister, Himanta Biswa Sarma.
The fall of Hasina has put India on high alert, given her administration’s balancing act of fostering strong ties with both India and China. India’s home minister, Amit Shah, announced that a committee has been formed to monitor the situation and ensure the safety of Indian nationals, Hindus, and other minorities in Bangladesh.
Meanwhile, Bangladesh’s interim government, led by Muhammad Yunus, has expressed concern over the attacks on minorities and pledged to address the situation urgently.
While the Indian Premier League (IPL) mega auction is just some months away, the uncertainty over MS Dhoni’s future in the tournament is still uncertain. Amid the speculations of his retirement, the player has remained tight-lipped about the chances of his participation in IPL 2025. Additionally, a mega auction before the upcoming edition means that things are going to be tough for the Chennai Super Kings (CSK) franchise if they opt to include Dhoni as a player.
43-year-old Dhoni, who called time on his international career in August, 2020, is close to his retirement from cricket. Hence, it would not be a right decision if CSK decide to retain him as it will fill one of the few slots that the franchise will be getting ahead of the auction. Meanwhile, CSK would also not want to exclude the legendary player, who has won five titles for them.
CSK reportedly asked for a reintroduction of a now-scrapped rule. Earlier in IPL, an international player after five years of his retirement would be named in the ‘uncapped’ category. However, this rule was abolished after IPL 2021. CSK reportedly want that rule to back as it would help them retain Dhoni as an ‘uncapped’ player, and utilize the ‘capped’ player category for another potential talent.
Ravichandran Ashwin has put forward his opinions regarding the report of CSK pushing for the rule to be reinstated.
“Will Dhoni play as an uncapped player? That’s a big question mark. The point is correct. He hasn’t played international cricket for many years. He has retired. So, he is an uncapped player. He is not a capped player,” said Ravichandran Ashwin said on his official YouTube channel.
“Can a player like Dhoni play as an uncapped player? That is another conversation. Obviously, if someone talks about Dhoni, everyone will talk about it,” he added.
Dhoni stepped down as the captain of CSK ahead of the start of the season this year, paving the way for Ruturaj Gaikwad to lead the team. Though CSK didn’t qualify for the playoffs, there were plenty of positives to take from Ruturaj’s leadership.
India cricketer Shardul Thakur has revealed many details about India’s victorious tour to Australia in 2020-21, stating that the team had not received good facilities from Cricket Australia. Terming the treatment towards them as “horrible”, Thakur stated that then-India captain Ajinkya Rahane and coach Ravi Shastri were regularly involved in arguments with Cricket Australia, as the team did not receive adequate facilities. Thakur revealed that several negative things were spoken about India, whilst going as far as calling then-Australia Test captain Tim Paine a liar.
In a public appearance, Shardul Thakur revealed his true feelings about the tour when asked what India’s famous win at The Gabba in Brisbane meant to him. India had won the four-match Test series 2-1.
“The way they treated us was very horrible,” said Thakur. “For four or five days, there would be no housekeeping service in the hotel. If you wanted to change the bedsheets, you would have to walk up five floors when you’re tired,” he continued.
Thakur revealed that the Governor of Queensland had said that Australia were not happy hosting India. Thakur then proceeded to rubbish an interview given by Tim Paine.
“I heard some interview from Tim Paine. That man was absolutely lying, he was just saving himself by making up things in the media,” said Thakur. “But I know the truth – Virat (Kohli) had left – and Ajinkya Rahane and Ravi Shastri were regularly fighting with Cricket Australia to give us what we wanted,” he added.
Thakur said that the reaction of the Indian players after winning the match was different to what it would usually be. India had won the tour despite Virat Kohli missing the last three Tests and several injury concerns. In the last Test in Brisbane, India had chased down a mammoth target of 329.
“For the first time ever, we did not even look at the Australians after winning. We wanted to tell them ‘Go and sit back in your dressing rooms’,” Thakur said.
The Indian cricket team started their tour of Zimbabwe with the first T20I encounter in Harare on Saturday. With the senior players coming back from the T20 World Cup 2024 triumph, the selectors decided to send a relatively young team under the captaincy of Shubman Gill. While India clinched their second T20 World Cup title after defeating South Africa in the final, the jersey for the T20I series against Zimbabwe has only one star on it. The stars on a team’s jersey denotes the number of times they have won the T20 World Cup and India have achieved the mammoth feat on two occasions – 2007 and 2024.
The reason behind the one star lies in the timing of the events. The Indian cricket team players departed for Zimbabwe before the T20 World Cup final and as a result, they are sporting jerseys which were designed before their departure. The jersey with two stars was unveiled by Sanju Samson after the Indian cricket team stars came back to India from Barbados after a considerable delay.
That is why, the old jersey does not have two stars but it can be expected that the jerseys which will be used from the next series onwards will have two stars on the logo to denote the two victories.
Meanwhile, India skipper Shubman Gill won the toss and opted to field against Zimbabwe.
“We will field first. I think it looks like a good surface. It won’t change much later. It has been long coming. We won an ICC event after 11 years. You always have some expectations from yourself. We have three debutants. Sharma, Jurel, and Parag make their debuts,” Gill said at the toss.
India (Playing XI): Shubman Gill (c), Abhishek Sharma, Ruturaj Gaikwad, Riyan Parag, Rinku Singh, Dhruv Jurel (w), Washington Sundar, Ravi Bishnoi, Avesh Khan, Mukesh Kumar, Khaleel Ahmed
Zimbabwe (Playing XI): Tadiwanashe Marumani, Innocent Kaia, Brian Bennett, Sikandar Raza(c), Dion Myers, Johnathan Campbell, Clive Madande(w), Wessly Madhevere, Luke Jongwe, Blessing Muzarabani, Tendai Chatara.
In an interview on the sidelines of the Google I/O Connect held in Bengaluru on Wednesday, Ajjarapu reasoned that with its largest mobile-first population, micro-payment and digital payment models, a booming startup and developer ecosystem, and diverse language landscape, “India is uniquely positioned to drive the next generation of AI innovation.”
In India, Google works with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology’s Startup Hub to train 10,000 startups in AI, expanding access to its artificial intelligence (AI) models like Gemini and Gemma (family of open models styled on Gemini tech), and introducing new language tools from Google DeepMind India, according to Ajjarapu.
It supports “eligible AI startups” with up to $350,000 in Google Cloud credits “to invest in the cloud infrastructure and computational power essential for AI development and deployment.”
Karya, an AI data startup that empowers low-income communities, is “using Gemini (also Microsoft products) to design a no-code chatbot,” while “Cropin (in which Google is an investor) is using Gemini to power its new real-time generative AI, agri-intelligent platform.”
Manu Chopra, co-founder and CEO of Karya, said he uses Gemini “to take Karya Platform global and enable low-income communities everywhere to build truly ethical and inclusive AI.”
Gemini has helped Cropin “build a more sustainable, food-secure future for the planet,” according to Krishna Kumar, the startup’s co-founder and CEO.
Robotic startup Miko.ai “is using Google LLM as a part of its quality control mechanisms,” says Ajjarapu.
According to Sneh Vaswani, co-founder and CEO of Miko.ai, Gemini is the “key” to helping it “provide safe, reliable, and culturally appropriate interactions for children worldwide.”
Helping farmers
With an eye on harnessing the power of AI for social good, Google plans to soon launch the Agricultural Landscape Understanding (ALU) Research API, an application programming interface to help farmers leverage AI and remote sensing to map farm fields across India, according to Ajjarapu.
The solution is built on Google Cloud and on partnerships with the Anthro Krishi team and India’s digital AgriStack. It is piloted by Ninjacart, Skymet, Team-Up, IIT Bombay, and the Government of India, he pointed out.
“This is the first such model for India that will show you all field boundaries based on usage patterns, and show you other things like sources of water,” he added.
On local language datasets, Ajjarapu underscored that Project Vaani, in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), has completed Phase 1 — over 14,000 hours of speech data across 58 languages from 80,000 speakers in 80 districts. The project plans to expand its coverage to all states of India, totaling 160 districts, in phase two.
Project Vaani introduced IndicGenBench, a benchmarking tool tailored for Indian languages, which covers 29 languages. Additionally, Project Vaani is open-sourcing its CALM (Composition of Language Models) framework for developers to integrate specialised language models with Gemma models. For example, integrating a Kannada specialist model into an English coding assistant may help in offering coding assistance in Kannada as well.
Google, which has Gemini Nano tailored for mobile devices, has introduced the Matformer framework, developed by the Google DeepMind team in India. According to Manish Gupta, director, Google, it allows developers to mix different sizes of Gemini models within a single platform.
This approach optimises performance and resource efficiency, ensuring smoother, faster, and more accurate AI experiences directly on user devices.
India-born Ajjarapu was part of Google’s corporate development team that handled mergers and acquisitions when Google’s parent Alphabet acquired UK-based AI company DeepMind in 2014. As a result, he got the opportunity to conduct the due diligence and lead the integration of DeepMind with Google.
Research, products and services
Ajjarapu, though, was not a researcher, and was unsure of meaningfully contributing to DeepMind’s mission, which “at that time, was to solve intelligence.” This prompted him to quit Google in 2017 after 11 years, and launch Lfyt’s self-driving division. Two years later, Ajjarupu rejoined Google DeepMind as senior director, engineering and product.
Last year, Alphabet merged the Brain team from Google Research and DeepMind into a single unit called Google DeepMind, and made Demis Hassabis its CEO. Jeff Dean, who reports to Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, serves as chief scientist to both Google Research and Google DeepMind.
While the latter unit focuses on research to power the next generation of products and services, Google Research deals with fundamental advances in computer science across areas such as algorithms and theory, privacy and security, quantum computing, health, climate and sustainability and responsible AI.
Has this merger led to a more product-focused approach at the cost of research, as critics point out? Ajjarapu counters that Google was still training its Gemini foundation models when the units were merged in April 2023, after which it launched the Gemini models in December, followed by Gemini 1.5 Pro, “which has technical breakthroughs like a long context window (2 million tokens that covers about 1 hour of video, or 11 hours of audio, or 30,000 lines of code).”
A context window is the amount of words, known as tokens, a language model can take as input when generating responses.
“Today, more than 1.5 million developers globally use Gemini models across our tools. The fastest way to build with Gemini is through Google AI Studio, and India has one of the largest developer bases on Google AI Studio,” he notes.
Google Brain and DeepMind, according to Ajjarapu, were also collaborating “for many years before the merger”.
“We believe we built an AI super unit at Google DeepMind. We now have a foundational research unit, which Manish is a part of. Our team is part of that foundation research unit. We also have a GenAI research unit, focused on pushing generative models regardless of the technique — be it large language models (LLMs) or diffusion models that gradually add noise (disturbances) to data (like an image) and then learn to reverse this process to generate new data,” said Ajjarapu, who is part of the product unit and whose job is to “take the research and put it in Google products.”
Google also has a science team, which is primarily responsible for things like protein folding and discovering new materials. Protein folding refers to the problem of determining the structure if a protein from its sequence of amino acids alone.
“There are many paradigms to go after AI development, and we feel like we’re pretty well covered in all of them,” he says. “We’re now fully in our Gemini era, bringing the power of multimodality to everyone.”
Match, incubate and launch
And how does Google decide which research products and product ideas to prioritise and invest in? According to Ajjurupa, the company uses an approach called “match, incubate, and launch.”
Is there a problem that’s ready to be solved with a technology that’s readily available? That’s the matching part. For instance, for graph neural nets, the map is a graph. So there is a match. However, even if there’s a match, performance is not guaranteed when it comes to generative AI.
“You have to iterate it,” he says.
The next step involves de-risking an existing technology or research breakthrough for the real world since not all of them are ready to be made into products. This phase is called incubation. The final stage is the launch.
“That’s the methodical approach that we follow. But given the changing nature of the world, and changing priorities, we try to be nimble,” says Ajjarupu.
Gupta, on his part, asks his research team to identify research problems that will have “some kind of a transformative impact on the world, which makes it worthy of being pursued, even if the problem is very hard or the chances of failure are very high.”
And how is Google DeepMind addressing ethical concerns around AI, especially biases and privacy? According to Gupta, the company has developed a framework to evaluate the societal impact of technology, created red teaming techniques, data sets and benchmarks, and shared them with the research community.
He adds that his team contributed the SeeGULL dataset (benchmark to detect and mitigate social stereotypes about groups of people in language models) to uncover biases in language models based on aspects such as nationality and religion.
“We work to understand and mitigate these biases and aim for cultural inclusivity too in our models,” says Gupta.
Ajjarapu adds that the company’s focus is on “responsible governance, responsible research, and responsible impact.”
He cited the example of the Google SynthID — an embedded watermark and metadata labelling solution that flags photos (deepfakes) generated using Google’s text-to-image generator, Imagen.
India captain Shubman Gill won the toss and opted to bowl against Zimbabwe in the first T20I of a five-match series in Harare on Saturday. Ahead of his captaincy debut, Gill had confirmed on the eve of the match that Abhishek Sharma will make his debut and open the innings with him. Apart from Abhishek, IPL stars Riyan Parag and Dhruv Jurel were also handed their debuts by the Indian team. Gill is leading the team in the absence of captain Rohit Sharma, who retired from the format after the T20 World Cup, while vice-captain Hardik Pandya has been rested.
Star India batter Virat Kohli also announced his T20I retirement after the final, suggesting that it’s time for the new generation to take over.
On being asked if there’s any pressure on him after Kohli’s remark, Gill said at the toss: ” Don’t feel pressure, you have expectations but from yourself, not from outside.”
“We want to have a look at the target and have the runs on the board. World Cup has been long coming, winning after 11 years. Very satisfied, hope many more to come. Three debutants: Abhishek, Riyan, Jurel,” Gill said at the toss in Harare.
Zimbabwe skipper Sikandar Raza said during the time of the toss, “I don’t mind batting first. The wicket looks good. Zimbabwe Cricket has trusted me with this transition phase. I look for young boys to come out and fight. It is humbling to lead this bunch. Sean has retired. It is a young side. Ervine will have a role in the future.”
India (Playing XI): Shubman Gill (c), Abhishek Sharma, Ruturaj Gaikwad, Riyan Parag, Rinku Singh, Dhruv Jurel (w), Washington Sundar, Ravi Bishnoi, Avesh Khan, Mukesh Kumar, Khaleel Ahmed
Zimbabwe (Playing XI): Tadiwanashe Marumani, Innocent Kaia, Brian Bennett, Sikandar Raza(c), Dion Myers, Johnathan Campbell, Clive Madande(w), Wessly Madhevere, Luke Jongwe, Blessing Muzarabani, Tendai Chatara.
India vs Zimbabwe 1st T20I Live Streaming: Team India will be squaring off against Zimbabwe in the first T20I of the five-match series in Harare on Saturday. Even as the euphoria of T20 World Cup triumph sweeps through the length and breadth of India, Shubman Gill, who was a reserve in that squad, will hit a refresh button along with a bunch of IPL performers. All the fresh faces are expected to make their international debut during the series scheduled to be played entirely in the Zimbabwean capital. As Gill also announced that Punjab teammate Abhishek Sharma will be making India debut and will be opening with him in the first game.
When will the India vs Zimbabwe 1st T20I match take place?
The India vs Zimbabwe 1st T20I match will take place on Saturday, July 6.
Where will the India vs Zimbabwe 1st T20I match be played?
The India vs Zimbabwe 1st T20I match will be played at the Harare Sports Club, Harare.
What time will the India vs Zimbabwe 1st T20I match start?
The India vs Zimbabwe 1st T20I match will start at 4:30 PM IST.
Which TV channels will telecast the India vs Zimbabwe 1st T20I match?
The India vs Zimbabwe 1st T20I match will be telecast on the Sony Sports Network.
Where to follow the live streaming of the India vs Zimbabwe 1st T20I match?
The India vs Zimbabwe 1st T20I match will be streamed live on SonyLiv app and website.
(All the details are as per the information provided by the broadcaster)
A new-look Indian cricket team slumped to a shocking loss against Zimbabwe in their first T20I encounter in Harare on Saturday. Ravi Bishnoi took four wickets while Washington Sundar took two as Zimbabwe could only manage to score 115/9 in 20 overs. In response, the Indian cricket team batters lost the plot completely as the visitors kept losing wickets at regular intervals and were all out for just 102. India skipper Shubman Gill criticised his side’s fielding after the 13-run loss and also said that after losing five wickets early, he himself should have stayed till the end to finish the match for his side.
“We bowled pretty well, we let ourselves down in the field. We were not up to standard and everyone looked a bit rusty. We spoke about taking time and enjoying our batting but it didn’t pan out that way. Halfway through we had lost 5 wickets, would’ve been best for us if I stayed there till the end, very disappointed with the way I got out and the rest of the match panned out. There was a bit of hope for us but when you’re chasing 115 and your no.10 batter is out there, you know something is wrong,” Gill said.
Zimbabwe captain Sikandar Raza was ecstatic with his team’s display and said that it was not a low-scoring surface and it was the calibre of the bowlers that did not allow the batters to score a lot of runs.
“Feel really happy about the win. Need to take one game at a time. The job is not done, series is not over. World champions play like world champions so we need to be ready for the next game. This isn’t a wicket where you get bowled out for 115. Credit to the bowlers of both sides. Clearly an indication we need to up our skills. I said I don’t care about the result as long as we could be true to the crowd and changing room, we had our plans, we stuck to it and we backed our guys. Our catching and ground fielding was amazing but we did make some errors, shows there’s room for improvement. We knew the fans would lift us up and give us energy, credit to them, it helped us,” Raza said at the post-match presentation.
The Indian cricket team met Prime Minister Narendra Modi after returning from Barbados following their T20 World Cup 2024 triumph. The Rohit Sharma-led side became the first team ever to not lose any match en route to clinching the title. They defeated South Africa in a thrilling final to win the T20 World Cup title after 17 years. During the meeting, PM Modi interacted with all the cricketers and spoke about different aspects of the win. During his conversation with fast bowler Jasprit Bumrah, PM Modi asked him whether he found it hard to survive without ‘idli’ and ‘paratha’ during the competition in the Caribbean.
The question left the cricketers in splits and Bumrah replied that they did not get any home food.
“We were not finding idli or paratha in West Indies. We made do with whatever we were getting. But, it was really nice to travel back to back. As a team, we had a lot of fun,” Bumrah replied.
#WATCH | During his interaction with PM Modi, Jasprit Bumrah said, “Whenever I bowl for India, I bowl in very crucial stages. Whenever the situation is difficult, I have to bowl in that situation. So I feel very good when I am able to help the team and if I am able to win the… pic.twitter.com/BaYZgX78T0
Meanwhile, BCCI secretary Jay Shah’s vision and support have played a huge role in Team India’s victory in the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2024. Following the team’s meeting with the Hon’ble Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi on Thursday, Jay Shah thanked PM Modi for his support.
“It was an absolute pleasure to meet and interact with the Honourable Prime Minister of India Shri Narendra Modi Ji at his official residence upon our arrival from Barbados. Prime Minister Sir has stood by #TeamIndia through ups and downs and has always encouraged the team to give its best
irrespective of the result. We are glad that the World Cup victory has brought a wave of euphoria across the country and filled every Indian with a sense of pride,” read the post by Jay Shah on Instagram.
Shah played a pivotal part in helping the team reach the country after the Champions were left stranded in Barbados due to Hurricane Beryl. The squad, alongside the support staff and several Indian journalists, returned to the country in the early hours of Thursday morning.
Following their meeting with PM Modi, the team rushed to the airport and went to Mumbai for the open-top bus parade and the presentation ceremony at the Wankhede Stadium.
