Current Affairs - Politics

Union Minister M. Venkaiah Naidu approved the construction of over 20 lakh affordable houses for urban poor in 4,720 cities and towns under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojna. The goal of ensuring housing for all by 2020 as a "challenging task" and expected the political and administrative leaderships in the State Governments.

The Minister of Railways Suresh Prabhu launched Mission Retro-Fitment to enhance the passenger experience by upgrading the existing fleet of coaches.It is an ambitious program to upgrade the level of furnishing & amenities in the coaches of Indian Railways. The largest retro fitment projects in the world as Indian Railways 40,000 coaches will be refurbished and retrofitted in the next five years.

The Environment Ministry banned cattle slaughter and introduced restrictions on the sale of cattle to prevent their killing. Animal markets cannot be set up within 50 km of an international border and 25 km from a state border. All animal markets have to run with the approval of district animal market committee to be headed by a magistrate. A gazette notification, titled Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (Regulation of Livestock Markets) Rules, 2017 by the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change states that no one can bring cattle to an animal.

External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj, Human Resource Department Minister Prakash Javadekar and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad jointly inaugurated the integration of E-Sanad with Central Board Secondary Education's (CBSE) digital repository 'Parinam Manjusha' in New Delhi. It is an e-service for online verification and attestation of documents of Indian citizens. It is ntegrated with Non- Tax Receipt Portal (NTRP) for enabling cashless payment.

The Coal Minister Piyush Goyal launched the Saral Eindhan Vitaran Application (SEVA) the mobile app and the online dashboard monitor the movement of coal from mines allocated to the power sector. The app tracks coal dispatch to 118 power plants through fuel supply agreement (FSA) of around 500 MT.