Amritsar: The Amritsar District Public Relations Officer (DPRO) has said that the Amritsar district administration resumed the blackout measures as part of a nationwide civil defence drill and asked people not to panic and stay indoors.
“Taking utmost caution, the Amritsar district administration has again started the blackout process. Please stay at home, do not panic and do not gather outside your houses; keep the outside lights switched off,” the Amritsar DPRO said on Wednesday in a statement.
The blackout in Amritsar was part of a nationwide civil defence mock drill ordered by the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) to check emergency preparedness in case of future threats.
The exercise involved scheduled blackouts at key locations across the country.
Several states, including Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, and Bihar, also observed similar blackouts.
Cities such as Barmer, Gwalior, Surat, Shimla, and Patna participated by switching off lights at key buildings and public spaces.
In the national capital, Delhi, Rashtrapati Bhavan and Vijay Chowk also went dark for the drill.
Earlier on Wednesday, Civil Defence mock drills were conducted in major cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Bengaluru, Gwalior, and Jaipur. These drills were meant to assess how local authorities and citizens respond to emergencies.
The Indian armed forces early Wednesday carried out 24 precision missile strikes on nine terror targets in Pakistan and Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir (POK), including Muridke and Bahawalpur — strongholds of terror groups Lashkar-e-Toiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), respectively.
More than 70 terrorists were killed and over 60 wounded in the strikes, sources said, as India significantly degraded the operational capability of these outfits.
JeM Chief Maulana Masood Azhar claimed that 10 members of his family and four of his aides were killed in the strikes.
The attacks, which were carried out at around 1 a.m., were in response to the terror attack in Pahalgam in Jammu and Kashmir’s Anantnag district that claimed 26 lives — 25 Indians and one Nepali citizen — on April 22.
In a statement, the Ministry of Defence confirmed targeting terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan and PoK “from where terrorist attacks against India have been planned and directed”.
India’s strikes came hours before a planned security drill across the country for “effective civil defence in the event of a hostile attack”, across 244 districts.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi had vowed to pursue the perpetrators of the attack and those who took part in its conspiracy to the “ends of the earth” to inflict punishment on them “beyond their imagination”.
(IANS)
