Cavalier India Defence Training Academy

Government policies and interventions for development in various sectors and issues arising out of their design and implementation. CONTEXT The National Register of Citizens (NRC) authorities have submitted to the Gauhati High Court an affidavit reportedly containing the details of “illegal foreigners” whose names had crept into the updated list of citizens released in 2019. BACKGROUND Some 19.06 lakh out of 3.3 crore applicants were excluded from the complete draft NRC published on August 31, 2019. It was later found that some “ineligible people” — those without papers establishing their domicile in Assam before March 24, 1971 — had been included in the citizens’ list. About NRC The NRC was created in 1951 to determine who was born in Assam and is therefore Indian, and who might be a migrant from erstwhile East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. The demand for updating the NRC was first raised in 1980 during the anti-foreigners Assam agitation spearheaded by the All Assam Students’ Union. A 2...

The Indian Express brings stories of the riflewomen posted near the Line of Control and monitoring a 10,200-ft-high Pass, learning to live with shelling, and excited about coming snow. In a first, the Indian Army has deployed a platoon of women soldiers near the Line of Control. (Express Photo by Shuaib Masoodi) The first time she heard an artillery shell drop in the valley below, Wanjen and her platoon members rushed to an underground bunker. Backs to the wall, hearts pounding, they did a quick headcount. “We did it several times after that. It is a different feeling each time — the anxiety, the adrenaline rush…,” she says. The 28-year-old senior Assam Rifles riflewoman, who, like her colleagues, doesn’t want her second name revealed, has six years of experience in Nagaland and Meghalaya. But this, she admits, is an entirely new battlefield — 10,200 feet above sea level, with the icy cold winds carrying the boom of artillery shells from down below. “That moment in the bunker is specia...