A Myanmar military aircraft skidded off the runway at Mizoram’s Lengpui Airport today during a mission to airlift Myanmar army personnel who had sought refuge in the northeastern state following intense clashes with rebel groups in their country.

The tabletop runway at Lengpui, known for its challenging nature, made the aircraft skid off the runway during its landing. 

India on Monday sent home at least 184 Myanmarese soldiers. An official statement from the Assam Rifles confirmed that a total of 276 Myanmarese soldiers had entered Mizoram last week, and on Monday, 184 of them were sent back to Myanmar.

The soldiers entered Bandukbanga village at the India-Myanmar-Bangladesh trijunction in Mizoram’s Lawngtlai district on January 17, and approached the Assam Rifles for assistance. 

Their camp had been overrun and captured by fighters belonging to the ‘Arakan Army,’ a Myanmarese insurgent group fighting for an independent  Rakhine State, prompting them to flee to Mizoram.

The Myanmarese soldiers were taken to the Assam Rifles camp at Parva, and later relocated to Lunglei for supervision. The repatriation process commenced with the group being flown on Myanmar Air Force planes from Lengpui airport near Aizawl to Sittwe in Myanmar’s Rakhine State.

An Assam Rifles official said that the remaining 92 soldiers will be repatriated today. The entire group is headed by a colonel and comprises 36 officers and 240 lower-rank personnel.
 

The idol of Ram Lalla or infant Lord Ram found a home on Monday with a Pran Pratishtha ceremony by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the new Ayodhya temple. The stone used to create the 51-inch idol is special black granite brought all the way from Karnataka.

“The stone is 2.5 billion years old,” confirms HS Venkatesh, Director of the National Institute of Rock Mechanics (NIRM), Bengaluru, the national facility that helped in testing the stone using physico-mechanical analysis. The NIRM is the nodal agency to test rocks for Indian dams and nuclear power plants.

Dr Venkatesh says, “The rock is highly durable and resistant to climatic variation and will sustain thousands of years in this subtropical zone with minimum maintenance.”

Most granitic rocks formed when molten lava cooled down after the earth was formed. The granite is a very hard material.

The Ram Temple has been constructed using traditional architectural designs and highest quality stones, yet it incorporates modern science and engineering techniques to make it durable, says Union Science Minister Jitendra Singh. “It has been designed to last for more than 1,000 years,” he adds.

The stone was chosen from the village Jayapura Hobli in Mysuru district, a region known for high quality granite mines.

The rock is dated to the pre-Cambrian era, which is estimated to have begun some four billion plus years ago. The earth is estimated to have originated some 4.5 billion years ago. The black granite rock from which the Ram Lalla statue has been sculpted has seen at least half or more of earth’s history.

Early humans appeared on earth about 14 million years ago and the humans as we see today – the species Homo sapiens – are only 300,000 years old. Scientists estimate that life originated on earth some 4 billion years ago.

The stone was carved into a beautiful idol by 38-year-old Arun Yogiraj from Mysuru, who belongs to a family of five generations of sculptors. It took him about six months to craft the Ram Lala statue. Among his other well-known masterpieces is the 30-feet black stone statue of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose at India Gate in Delhi.

The NIRM, which helped assess the granite block with its testing laboratories at Kolar Gold Fields, told Nripendra Misra, chairperson of the temple construction committee, that the rock was “massive, melanocratic and uniform in colour”. The stone is fine-grained, hard, compact and has high compressive strength, tensile strength, bending strength, breaking strength and elasticity. 

The rock’s qualities make it amenable for any kind of carving, Dr Venkatesh says. “In addition the rock possess high density, low porosity and water absorption with high P wave velocity, it is devoid of any internal cracks and fractures.”

The stone does not absorb water or react with carbon.