Latest news with #EBC
Edinburgh Reporter
7 hours ago
- Business
- Edinburgh Reporter
Edinburgh company in with a chance of four awards
An Edinburgh-based company is hoping to continue a successful year after being shortlisted in four categories at the Regional Energy Efficiency Awards 2025. The Edinburgh Boiler Company (EBC) which is based in Dalkeith, has been nominated for Boiler Installer of the Year, Solar Installer of the Year, ASHP Installer of the Year and Director of the Year. The awards, which recognise best practice within the industry, are open to anyone involved in the energy saving and efficiency sector in Scotland, with judges looking for demonstrable skills, expertise and quality of service from nominees. Winners will be announced at a ceremony in Glasgow later this month. EBC managing director Dougie Bell said: 'We have a strong team at the Edinburgh Boiler Company and it's fantastic to see their work recognised with these nominations. 'We made a conscious effort to pivot into renewables a couple of years ago and this kind of recognition validates what was an important transition for us. 'To be up for four awards is fantastic – good luck to everyone else who has been nominated.' A spokesman for the Energy Efficiency Awards, said: 'In 2025 we continue to recognise the great innovators and achievements in our industry. 'It is vital to save energy and in doing so help the environment and drive down our energy bills and it is our award winners and nominees who are at the sharp end setting out to achieve this. 'They have often been the unsung heroes of our industry and our regional and national awards events give them the voice and recognition they deserve.' The move into solar and heat pump installations helped EBC post a record turnover of £7.2m in its latest set of financial results, with sales up 60% on the previous 12 months. The company also gained national recognition towards the end of last year when it was named Building Services Contractor of the Year at the H&V News Awards 2024. Like this: Like Related
Time of India
8 hours ago
- Politics
- Time of India
PM Modi in Bihar: CM Nitish Kumar praises PM for caste census; asks Bihar voters to express gratitude
PM Modi with CM Nitish Kumar at Siwan rally (ANI photo) NEW DELHI: Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar on Friday asked people of his poll-bound state to express gratitude towards Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who decided to hold a caste census along with population census in 2027. Addressing a rally in Siwan, which PM Modi also attended, Nitish Kumar said: "Ordering a caste census is a great thing that the Centre has done. I thank the Prime Minister for the same," said Kumar, and addressing the people, "you all may please express your gratitude towards him". A caste census involves systematically recording individuals' caste identities during a national census. In India, where caste influences social, economic, and political life, such data can offer valuable insights into the distribution and socio-economic status of various caste groups. Caste enumeration was a regular feature of census exercises during British rule from 1881 to 1931. However, with the first census of independent India in 1951, the government chose to discontinue the practice, except for Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs). Interestingly, under the Nitish Kumar-led Mahagathbandhan government, which included Lalu Yadav's RJD and the Congress party, a caste census was conducted in Bihar between 2022 and 2023 to collect detailed data on the state's caste composition. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Doutor: Manter a massa muscular após os 50 anos depende deste hábito noturno Revista do Homem Saiba Mais Undo Later, in the second half of 2023, the Bihar government released its statistical data on the caste-based headcount. The data showed that the politically sensitive 113-caste group known as the extremely backward classes (EBCs) constitute the largest portion at 36 per cent, along with the other backward classes at 27 per cent, which amounts to 63 per cent of the total 13.07 crore population of the state; together they constitute the social hefty segment of backward classes. Muslims constitute 17.7 per cent of the state's population, including EBC and 'upper caste' Muslims. After the figures were out, CM Nitish Kumar and his then deputy Tejashwi Yadav, decided to call it a "caste-based headcount", and not a "caste census", to escape a legal tangle as Union junior home minister Nityanand Rai had told Lok Sabha in 2021 that it would not be legally tenable to hold a "caste census" as the law provides for only count of SC/ST groups. The caste-wise breakup shows that the 'upper caste' groups among Hindus, considered BJP's mainstay, account for only 10.6 per cent, Brahmins 3.7 per cent, Rajputs (Thakurs) 3.4 per cent, Bhumihars 2.9 per cent and Kayasthas 0.6 per cent. The Bihar caste count appeared to have a little deviation in the caste-wise population of 2023 Bihar compared to the 1901 figures for the erstwhile combined region of Bihar and Jharkhand. Bihar, Jharkhand, and Odisha were carved out of Greater Bengal in 1912. As Stephen Henningham notes in his book Peasant Movements in Colonial India: North Bihar in 1901, the 'higher' or upper castes in Bihar then accounted for 15.6 per cent of the population, middle castes such as Koeri, Kurmi, and Yadav made up 19.8 per cent, Muslims constituted 16.1 per cent, and lower middle castes along with Scheduled Castes formed 47.9 per cent. The total Hindu population in 1901 stood at 83.3 per cent, compared to 82 per cent in present-day Bihar as revealed by the 2023 caste survey.
India Today
a day ago
- Politics
- India Today
Why RJD chose an EBC as state president
As Bihar prepares for its most decisive political carnival, democracy asserts itself as part pageant, part arithmetic. Pitted against a formidable five-party National Democratic Alliance (NDA), Tejashwi Yadav of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) has deployed a stratagem as old as power: if you cannot disarm your adversaries, win over their followers. Thus, sending ripples through Bihar's mud-brick constituencies and bamboo-scaffolded villages, the RJD has anointed veteran socialist leader and former MP Mangani Lal Mandal—a scion of the Dhanuk caste, listed among the Extremely Backward Classes (EBCs)—as its new state 76, Mandal brings not only a lifetime of political odyssey but, crucially, fresh momentum to RJD plans to penetrate the votes of the EBCs, a sprawling coalition of 112 castes accounting for some 36.01 per cent of Bihar's this calculus steps Mandal with his Dhanuk cohort—2.21 per cent of the state's population, yet among the top five EBC groups in density, concentrated in districts such as Madhubani, Supaul, Patna and Nalanda, and holding significant numbers in over a dozen others. Since CM Nitish Kumar introduced 20 per cent reservation for EBCs in Panchayat bodies in January 2006, these communities have formed the chief prop beneath the Janata Dal (United) canopy. But politics is mutable, and Tejashwi's gamble is to wrest that foundation from beneath Kumar's feet, repurposing it for the INDIA alliance's prospects in the assembly polls slated for October and this end, the RJD's organisational elections—a meticulous choreography conducted from the block to district levels over the past four months—have been as much about ritual representation as realpolitik. In each district, a patchwork of quotas ensured that Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs) and the EBCs themselves saw their leaders elevated; yet for the state presidency, only one name was ever With no one contesting his nomination, Mandal will formally step into the role vacated by Jagdanand Singh, a Thakur leader and longtime Lalu Prasad confidante who, sources say, simply 'expressed his unwillingness' to carry on. Singh's resignation, accepted with all the solemnity of a ritual libation, cleared the path for Mandal's uncontested ascendancy—an outcome that signals both the RJD's urgency in courting the EBC bloc and its confidence in the Dhanuk veteran's ability to deliver his supporters to the polling the casual observer, Mandal might seem an unlikely standard-bearer. Born and bred in the Kosi and Mithilanchal regions, his political life has been rooted in the very soil of parochial identities. He first cut his teeth under Karpoori Thakur, the inadvertently eponymous architect of Bihar's own affirmative politics, earning a seat in the Legislative Council in 1986 as a Lok Dal nominee. For 18 years, until 2004, Mandal represented his caste's interests from the council benches, even securing a ministerial portfolio in the RJD government of the 1990s. Yet, while contemporaries Lalu and Nitish ascended to the national stage, Mandal's orbit remained confined—respected but regional, influential yet never 2004, a new chapter began when he crossed the floor to join Nitish's JD(U), which promptly dispatched him to the Rajya Sabha. Five years later, he contested—and won—the Jhanjharpur Lok Sabha seat for the JD(U), only to surrender it in a series of capricious realignments: a return to the RJD, another defection to JD(U) just before the 2019 polls, and a vice-presidency in the latter's national hierarchy. Each switch, while sharpening whispered accusations of opportunism, underscored one immutable truth: Mandal, for all his electoral vicissitudes, remains one of the most relevant EBC relevance is now the RJD's greatest currency. Aware that Muslims (17.7 per cent of voters) and Yadavs (14.26 per cent) alone cannot clinch victory in Bihar's bipolar contest, the party's leadership has crafted a strategy to cobble together enough disparate blocs to forestall a straight fight between the INDIA alliance and the BJP-JD(U) Prashant Kishor's Jan Suraaj succeed in siphoning votes from both alliances, Bihar could be plunged into a three-cornered contest—leaving the two major coalitions, the NDA and INDIA, scrambling to secure an outright majority—precisely the sort of impasse in which the RJD might finally flourish beyond the confines of a straight bipolar fight with the NDA. Jan Suraaj, though, remains a mercurial entity—its tactics unpredictable, its grassroots machinery still in its infancy—so the RJD must hedge its bets by fortifying its own placing Mandal at the helm in Patna, the RJD signals not only a gesture of inclusion but a declaration of intent: to traverse caste hierarchies from the Yadav pulpit down to the most marginalised to reflect on his unopposed elevation, Mandal adopted the deferential tone of a seasoned cadre. 'It is a matter of great honour,' he told reporters, 'and a challenge and responsibility in this election year. I am deeply thankful to national president Lalu Prasad and Leader of Opposition Tejashwi Yadav for this trust.' His words, though circumspect, belie the knowing confidence of one who has navigated power's labyrinth for decades. For beneath the courteous veneer lies a lifetime of electoral tunnel vision—an acute understanding of micro-majorities, vote swings and the art of coalition-building at the booth senior RJD insider put it bluntly: 'Mangani Lal Mandal is our most credible EBC face. His election sends a strong message that RJD practises A-to-Z politics.' It is a nod to inclusivity without excluding any particular caste or community, but the shorthand here is unmistakable: weaponise representation to deter defection. In Bihar, where every leader's loyalty is measured in inches of margin and percentages of turnout, such signalling can prove October, when the polls open and placards flutter above the looming speaker-nests in village squares, it will be the ground game that delivers or defeats the INDIA alliance. Will Mandal's presence—zinc-grey hair gleaming beneath a folded cap—animate the EBCs to rally behind the RJD? Can he, with his measured gait and supple courtroom rhetoric, translate personal gravitas into collective mobilisation? Only then will one know whether Tejashwi's gambit has shifted Bihar's electoral geometry or merely reshuffled its entrenched fault now, the appointment stands as one of Tejashwi's boldest moves since assuming the RJD's de facto leadership. It marries the iconography of socialist stalwarts to the impulse of youthful ambition—and positions the party to lay claim to the very constituency that once seemed secured by its chief rival. In the end, Mandal's mantle is more than ceremonial: it is the newest weapon in an unfolding contest where every caste, every community and every vote warrant strategic consideration. And in Bihar, strategy is not an abstraction but a daily, door-to-door endeavour, measured in the hum of two-strokes, the sway of cadences and the muster of hands at the to India Today Magazine
Scroll.in
a day ago
- Automotive
- Scroll.in
Rajasthan HC Driver registration begins for 58 posts; here's apply link
The Rajasthan High Court has invited online applications from eligible candidates for the recruitment to the posts of Chauffeur for RHC and Driver for RSLSA District Courts and DLSAs 2025. Candidates can apply for the posts on the official website till July 7, 2025. The recruitment drive aims to fill 58 vacancies, of which 27 are for Chauffeur and 31 for Driver. Candidates can check the eligibility criteria, pay scale, and other details available in the notification below: Here's the official notification. Application Fee Applicants from unreserved/ OBC and EBC (creamy layer)/ other category candidates are required to pay a fee of Rs 750, whereas Rs 600 applies to state's OBC and EBC (non-creamy layer)/ EWS. Applicants from SC/ ST will have to pay the fee of Rs 450. Steps to apply for Rajasthan HC Driver, Chauffeur posts 2025
Scroll.in
a day ago
- General
- Scroll.in
RSSB VDO recruitment 2025: Apply for 850 VDO posts till July 18, details here
Rajasthan Staff Selection Board (RSSB) has invited online applications from eligible candidates for the recruitment of Village Development Officers 2025. Eligible candidates can apply for the posts at till July 18, 2025. The recruitment exam is likely to be conducted on August 31, 2025. The board aims to fill 850 VDO posts. Applicants can check the eligibility criteria, pay scale, and other details available in the notification below: Here's the official notification for VDO posts 2025. Application Fee Applicants from unreserved/ OBC and EBC (creamy layer) are required to pay a fee of Rs 600, whereas Rs 400 applies to OBC and EBC (non-creamy layer)/ EWS/ SC/ ST/ PwD. Steps to apply for VDO posts 2025
