NEW DELHI: A massive blaze raged for hours at a fireworks factory in southern India, killing at least 40 workers and injuring 60 Wednesday, police said.
Large amounts of firecrackers and raw materials had been stored in the Om Siva Shakti factory with major Hindu festivals weeks away.
Police officer Najmul Huda said rescue workers and firefighters initially could not get into the building as the fire raged, triggering deafening explosions of firecrackers.
Workers fled the area, but many were killed as they waited at a nearby warehouse which also caught fire and exploded, Huda told reporters.
The Press Trust of India news agency said that about 300 people were working in the factory and 52 died.
Huda said authorities had suspended the factory’s license a day earlier after finding major safety violations. The management, however, operated the factory illegally on Wednesday, he said.
The fire, which spread to 40 of the factory’s 60 rooms, was put out more than five hours after it began, witnesses and news reports said. Photographs showed the factory had burned to rubble, and fireworks littered the ground.
The cause of the fire was not immediately known, police officer P. Karupaiah said.
Sivakasi town in Tamil Nadu state is India’s biggest hub for the manufacture of matches and firecrackers. The town is about 500 kilometers (310 miles) southwest of Chennai, the state capital.
The CNN-IBN television news channel said rescue workers had completed a search of the devastated building for trapped workers.
Blaze at India fireworks factory kills at least 40
Blaze at India fireworks factory kills at least 40
India plans AI ‘data city’ on staggering scale
- ‘The data city is going to come in one ecosystem ... with a 100 kilometer radius’
NEW DELHI: As India races to narrow the artificial intelligence gap with the United States and China, it is planning a vast new “data city” to power digital growth on a staggering scale, the man spearheading the project says.
“The AI revolution is here, no second thoughts about it,” said Nara Lokesh, information technology minister for Andhra Pradesh state, which is positioning the city of Visakhapatnam as a cornerstone of India’s AI push.
“And as a nation ... we have taken a stand that we’ve got to embrace it,” he said ahead of an international AI summit next week in New Delhi.
Lokesh boasts the state has secured investment agreements of $175 billion involving 760 projects, including a $15 billion investment by Google for its largest AI infrastructure hub outside the United States.
And a joint venture between India’s Reliance Industries, Canada’s Brookfield and US firm Digital Realty is investing $11 billion to develop an AI data center in the same city.
Visakhapatnam — home to around two million people and popularly known as “Vizag” — is better known for its cricket ground that hosts international matches than cutting-edge technology.
But the southeastern port city is now being pitched as a landing point for submarine internet cables linking India to Singapore.
“The data city is going to come in one ecosystem ... with a 100 kilometer radius,” Lokesh said. For comparison, Taiwan is roughly 100 kilometers wide.
Lokesh said the plan goes far beyond data connectivity, adding that his state had “received close to 25 percent of all foreign direct investments” to India in 2025.
“It’s not just about the data centers,” he explained while outlining a sweeping vision of change, with Andhra Pradesh offering land at one US cent per acre for major investors.
