-The Times of India   Claiming that the Gopalgarh incident which claimed NINe lives was not a communal riot, the fact finding team of Muslim Forum on Wednesday said it happened due to the total failure of the state government and demanded stepping down of chief minister Ashok Gehlot and home minister Shanti Dhariwal. The Muslim Forum, a joint organization of all the Muslim organizations of the state, lashed out at the Ashok...

The key to determiNINg the events that led to the death of NINe Meo Muslims in clashes in Bharatpur’s Gopalgarh on September 14 could lie with two figures, a Meo and a Gurjjar, both “underground” at the moment. The Meo is a 47-year-old maulvi called Abdul Rashid, who was allegedly severely assaulted by the Gurjjars the day before the killings, which greatly agitated the Meos. The Gurjjar is an unidentified man who...

Less than two years after splitting coal miNINg zones into ‘go and no-go’ — a move that has stalled almost every big-ticket coal miNINg project in India — the government is scrapping the policy. The Ministry of Environment and Forest (MoEF), which had framed the policy guidelines along with the Ministry of Coal, on Tuesday accepted that the categorisation of ‘go and no-go’ did not have any legal sanctity. The move was...

-IBN   Just days after a massive earthquake hit Sikkim, the northeastern state was on Thursday hit by flash floods. The flash floods hit Lachung, located in north Sikkim district near China border, damaging at least two houses, including one Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) camp. As many as 100 people have been stranded due to the flash floods that occurred on Thursday. Meanwhile, rescue operations are on in the quake-hit areas of the state,...

NINe villages with a combined population of 1,000 were out of the reach of the rescue effort in North Sikkim till this eveNINg, injecting a fresh sense of urgency into a task force blasting past and working around boulders blocking roads in the region. The cut-off villages are located in Dzongu, the protected area of the Lepchas, the indigenous tribal community of Sikkim. The villages have been identified as Shipgyer, Bey,...