作者： bharat.cn

Angry passengers in India lashed out at the air crew and threatened to storm the cockpit after they were forced to spend hours on board, as their flight was delayed for technical reasons.
Air India flight AI 865 was about to make the trip between India’s capital, Delhi and Mumbai on Thursday when an apparent technical glitch forced the plane full of passengers to return from the runaway to its ramp.

The crew, however, did not let the passengers disembark immediately, apparently hoping the issue was minor and would be resolved more or less on the spot. This proved, however, not to be the case.

The passengers had to spend more than four hours effectively trapped on the plane before they were finally cleared to get off the aircraft. The long hours of waiting began to wear on people’s patience.

Footage emerged online showing disgruntled passengers standing in the aisle as the cabin crew attempts to calm things down. A group of particularly agitated people can be seen knocking on the cockpit door, demanding the pilots come out. Some can be heard calling the pilots “losers” while others threaten to break down the door.

The cabin crew still somehow managed to keep things under control as, according to local media, the passengers spent around two more hours inside the plane without much disturbance, and the cockpit remained intact.

However, after more than four hours of waiting, some, perhaps understandably, just about completely lost it. As the crew was about to let the passengers out, a woman rushed to the exit door to open it on her own. A flight attendant had to intervene, as other passengers pleaded with the woman to let it go.

Eventually, the passengers flew to Mumbai on another aircraft following an eight-hour delay. All’s well that ends well, but that may not apply to at least some of the passengers who could face consequences over their angry outbursts, as both the airline and India’s civil aviation regulator, DGCA, have launched an inquiry into the case.

“DGCA has asked Air India management to take necessary action against unruly passengers,” the regulator’s official told the local media.

India has recently introduced new rules aimed at countering disruptive behavior on airplanes. The punishments under these regulations vary from three-months’ grounding over “physical gestures or verbal harassment” to a lifetime ban on flying for “life-threatening behavior,” damage to an aircraft, and attempted or actual breach of cockpit.

• Hundreds of start-up tech firms are offering everything from wearable health monitors for livestock to real-time agriscience data
• The boom has excited investors and raised hopes of solutions to the industry’s more intractable problems – if the government is willing to help

In India, agriculture remains a pillar of the economy, contributing about 18 per cent of GDP and employing more than half of the population. Yet the industry is highly fragmented, with outdated infrastructure and poor logistics contributing to an estimated US$13.1 billion post-harvest loss each year, according to Indian environment and science magazine Down to Earth.
But India’s booming agritech industry hopes to change all that, and has some novel ideas – wearable tech for livestock and facial recognition systems for cows among them – to do so.
Amid a wave of suicides by heavily indebted farmers and mass protests demanding better crop prices, drought relief and loan waivers, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has promised to increase farmers’ incomes and in 2018, launched the ‘DigiGaon’ or Digital Village programme, which aims to connect more than 100,000 villages to the internet so that residents can access services such as banking, health care and education online.
The prospect of greater rural connectivity appears to have inspired India’s private sector, and agricultural technology start-ups are now booming – in August, there were at least 450 nationwide, according to industry body the National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom), with that figure expected to increase by 25 per cent annually.
CropIn, a nine-year-old start-up based in Bangalore that has been backed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is indicative of the trend. After somewhat troubled beginnings, it has grown 300 per cent in the past 15 months on the back of providing farmers with real-time agriscience data that they can access using their smartphones.
The company uses “field officers” to collect an array of information – ranging from weather patterns to land records and crop yields – which is then collated and presented on a single connected platform that adds value “for each stakeholder, be it farmers, banks, insurance firms, commodity traders, government and development agencies, farming companies, or the end customer,” said start-up co-founder Kunal Gupta.
“We’ve so far digitised 5.5 million acres of farmland and are expanding our operations overseas as well,” he said.
Money has been flowing into the sector from foreign investment funds such as the US-based Tiger Global and Germany’s Bertelsmann, with US$248 million invested in various Indian agritech initiatives in the first six months of 2019 – a 300 per cent increase on the whole of 2018.
And there certainly isn’t a lack of problems that need to be tackled either – Sangeeta Gupta, senior vice-president and chief strategy officer at Nasscom, identified bottlenecks in the country’s supply chain system, soil-data management and technology-driven initiatives as three areas where start-ups can bring a range of benefits.
“For the start-ups, choosing the right marketing strategy and specialising in a particular segment to scale it across the country will be crucial given that India is a diverse agriculture market with a variety of needs,” she said, adding that companies will also need policy support from the government to thrive.

India will send its Chandrayaan 3 orbiter to the Moon, hoping that it could further explore the Earth’s satellite later this year. The previous attempt failed after mission control lost contact with the Chandrayaan 2 rover.
Chandrayaan-3, India’s third lunar exploration mission, will attempt to land on the Moon again, Jitendra Singh, minister of state for department of space, confirmed Wednesday. “Yes, the [next] lander and rover mission will happen in 2020,” he told the media.

Singh said the new spacecraft will incorporate lessons learned during last year’s Chandrayaan 2 mission which attempted to deploy a lander called Vikram, but suddenly fell silent during hard touchdown “within 500m of the designated landing site.” However, Chandrayaan 2 can’t be seen as failure, the official explained.

There is no country in the world that has landed on its first attempt; the US took several attempts. But we will not need so many attempts.

Revealing some details about the mission, ISRO chief K Sivan said that Chandrayaan-3 – which is set to launch in November this year – will be similar to its predecessor. “In Chandrayaan-3, we will have landing and rover with propulsion module,” he said, adding, “this is going to be an eventful year for ISRO.”

India is striving to become the fourth country, after the US, USSR, and China, to land on the Moon. Chandrayaan 2 stands out from other missions, as it attempted to land at the little-explored South Pole. It was tasked with gathering data on the lunar surface, searching for water and minerals. Among other things, the mission’s goal was recording and measuring moonquakes.