2 min readOct 19, 2026 07:10 AM IST First published on: Oct 19, 2026 at 06:40 AM ISTThe Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi, criticised big business houses in India for not making any efforts to boost exports. On the contrary, small entrepreneurs had shown remarkable enterprise in this direction, he said. Addressing members of the Indian community at Auckland at the end of his three-day visit, Rajiv Gandhi said the government would give all possible assistance to the small-scale sector to help them make their products more competitive and achieve higher standards of quality. At this juncture, the country needed to build up its foreign exchange reserves and capture markets for its products abroad. Unfortunately, big business was not doing anything in this direction.US not to deport illegal aliensThe US Congress has passed the most far-reaching immigration bill in 20 years, lifting the threat of deportation for aliens who smuggled themselves into the US or overstayed before January 1, 1982 and have been staying in the United States illegally since. The bill, however, also includes stringent restrictions on employers who hire illegal aliens hereafter, and stricter supervision of the border.Three shot dead in PunjabAdvertisementUnidentified persons shot dead three persons in Punjab — Jathedar Kirpal Singh, an Akali Dal activist, a school teacher and the son of a Congress-I leader — while three suspected terrorists were arrested during the last 24 hours. The jathedar was shot dead near a tube-well outside the Naushehra Pannuan village, 40 km from Amritsar.BJP seeks government’s replyEven as the national executive of the Bharatiya Janata Party continued discussions on the proposed chargesheet on the two years of “misrule” by the Rajiv Gandhi government, the former party president, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, demanded that the Government make its position clear regarding the specific allegations made by P C Sethi against Rajiv Gandhi and Madhavrao Scindia in an interview to a Bombay weekly.