-The Telegraph Guwahati: People flocking to NRC seva kendras in Assam on Friday to learn the reasons behind their exclusion from the draft National Register of Citizens were told to come back after Sunday. The date from which the reasons are to be revealed had already been postponed once, from Tuesday to Friday. Also, the forms to file claims and objections were supposed to be available online and at the seva kendras from...

-Hindustan Times The universities need to think of evolving a strategy to hire the best people and offer them attractive salaries to keep them motivated More than half the professorial posts in country’s central universities are vacant. Of the 2,426 sanctioned posts for professors across the central universities, 1,301 have not been filled, reveals data provided by human resource development minister Prakash Javadekar in the Lok Sabha. The lacuna caused by faculty...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Forced to defer introduction of the Right to Information (Amendment) Bill, 2018, in the face of stiff opposition in Parliament and outside, the Narendra Modi government appears to have brought it into effect without parliamentary approval through an advertisement. On July 26, the department of personnel, public grievances & pensions issued an advertisement for appointment of information commissioners in the Central Information Commission (CIC) that said the "salary,...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Friday directed the Centre and nine states, including Bengal, to file affidavits within four weeks stating by when they would fill their vacant posts of information commissioners and, in some cases, even chief information commissioners. The bench of Justices A.K. Sikri and Ashok Bhushan were hearing a petition from RTI activist Anjali Bharadwaj, who cited four vacancies in the Central Information Commission and many...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The income tax department has allowed referral kickbacks paid to doctors by private hospitals, nursing homes and diagnostic centres and spending on advertisements by doctors as expenses despite such expenditure being disallowed and unethical, a parliamentary panel said on Thursday. The public accounts committee for the Union finance ministry's department of revenue has cited an audit that found that in 19 instances in eight states, income-tax officers had...