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An elderly man died after he was crushed by the chariot of Bisket Jatra in Bhaktapur on Monday.

The deceased has been identified as Durgaman Kasapal (71) of Katunje, Suryabinayak Municipality-5, Bhaktapur.

Critically injured in the incident, he breathed his last during the course of treatment at the Bhaktapur Hospital.

The seventh agriculture census is taking place from tomorrow (Tuesday). For the census that takes place every 10 years, 5,200 enumerators and 1,300 supervisors have been deployed.

The supervisors will visit the houses of total 350,000 farmers at 753 local levels of all 77 districts and collect details about agricultural activities, said Deputy Director General at Central Bureau of Statistics, Hemraj Regmi.

The agriculture census that began six months after the national census will conclude in 45 days while 19 days are allocated for data collection. The country had held the first agriculture census in 2018 BS.

The enumerators will collect details about livestock farming, crops and fishery done by the farmers. The condition of arable and barren lands and fertilizers is also listed for the data collection. The farmers will be asked 24 questions related to agricultural activities.

According to the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock Development, around 66 percent population is engaged in agriculture, and agriculture and livestock farming has contributed 27 percent to the gross domestic product.

However, in eight months of the current fiscal year, around one-third of the total imports is related to agricultural products, according to the Department of Customs.

The census is expected to help with the formulation of plan and policy, monitoring and evaluation, said the Department Director Rajan Silwal.

Despite government prioritising agriculture, expected results are a far cry at present. Country's youths leaving for foreign jobs, failure to timely complete national pride irrigation projects, conversion of arable lands into plots and lack of availability of seeds and fertilizers in time among others are blamed for this. Failure to utilise barren lands and distribution of lands to landless squatters are also the concern. The number of landless squatters and small farmers has been around 4 million, according to available data.

According to the sixth census, 116,000 people were deprived of engaging in agriculture due to lack of their lands.

Seventy one percent people had engaged in agriculture for lifetime and 83 percent dependent on agriculture as per the census. Likewise, 42 percent farmers were deprived of agriculture loans.

Nepal reported 10 new Covid-19 cases on Monday.

According to the Ministry of Health and Population, 3, 600 swab samples were tested in the RT-PCR method, of which nine returned positive. Likewise, 1,091 people underwent antigen tests, of which one was tested positive.

The Ministry said that no one died of virus in the last 24 hours. The Ministry said that 34 infected people recovered from the disease.

As of today, there are 350 active cases in the country.

India’s tally of daily COVID-19 cases nearly doubled on Monday from the previous day to more than 2,000 for the first time in a month, government data showed, and the southern state of Kerala reported a big jump in deaths, Reuters reported.

India was at the centre of the global COVID crisis this time last year but the situation has improved since then and most precautions including the wearing of masks have recently been dropped.

But cases have been creeping up in the country of 1.35 billion people, with 2,183 new infections reported on Monday, taking the running total to more than 43 million, according to health ministry data, according to Reuters.

The ministry reported 214 more deaths, including 151 since April 13 in the southern state of Kerala, which is widely considered to issue more accurate data than many other states.

India has reported a total of about 522,000 deaths from the coronavirus though many global experts have said its real death toll could be up to 4 million, from several hundred million cases.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has repeatedly rejected those higher estimates saying the mathematical models used to estimate deaths in smaller countries cannot be relied on for India, Reuters reported.

Apart from Kerala, the capital, Delhi, and the states of Maharashtra and Haryana reported triple-digit increases in infections in the past 24 hours.

However, hospitalisations remained low though those numbers have also been inching up over recent days since all restrictions were dropped, according to Reuters.