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The Hindu July 11, 2019 The Assam government will establish 200 Foreigners’ Tribunals (FTs) for handling cases of people to be excluded from the final National Register of Citizens (NRC). July 31 is the deadline for publishing the NRC. These FTs would be in addition to the existing 100 and are part of the 1,000 that the Centre had decided to help Assam set up in view of the pressure anticipated in disposing of cases of people to be left out of the NRC. Officials in the State’s Home and Political Department said the new FTs would be distributed among six districts. Kamrup (Metropolitan) district, which covers Guwahati and outskirts, would get 67 of these, followed by Nagaon with 39, Jorhat with 31, Bongaigaon with 22, Sonitpur with 21, and Cachar with 20. “Apart from the cases of people left out of the NRC, the new FTs will deal with the regular cases of D-voters [doubtful voters],” a senior officer said.  Organisations representing Bengali-speaking Hindus and Mu...

The Wire July 11,2019 Released a day before the Union budget, Indian government’s Economic Survey 2018-19 advocated for making the cleaning of rivers an integral part of the country’s clean India campaign. However, the ‘nudge’ by the economic survey did not translate into serious policy action in the union budget. Evaluating it from an environmental perspective, the budget speech by India’s finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman also did not adequately address India’s urgent environmental issues like air pollution, river pollution and threats to wildlife, forests and tribal rights. And while the threat of climate change looms large on India, the budget speech failed to acknowledge it. In fact, after it was addressed in the first budget presented by Arun Jaitley in 2014-15, during Narendra Modi-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government, ‘climate change’ has not found space again in the four subsequent budget speeches (2015-16, 2016-17, 2017-18 and 2018-19) under the...