Winter session to begin from Nov 18

NEWDELHI: The winter session of Parliament will commence from November 18 and continue till December 13. The ministry of parliamentary affairs has communicated this to the secretariats of both Houses of Parliament.

The Cabinet Committee on Parliamentary Affairs (CCPA) had met last week at defence minister Rajnath Singh’s residence to discuss the possible schedule for Parliament’s winter session.

The winter session is beginning as India stares at an economic slowdown. Though the

Centre has announced various measures to deal with the situation such as tax rate reduction, yet the opposition has been critical of the Modi government’s policies related to areas like agriculture and banking. It has maintained that the adverse impact of 2016 move to ban high-value notes is visible amid a big slump in sales of cars etc.

The opposition and the government are also expected to lock horns over the situation in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) in the aftermath of the revocation of the region’s special status.

The Opposition is all set to demand a debate on the National

Register of Citizens (NRC), which left out nearly 2 million people in Assam in September as part of an exercise to check illegal immigration from Bangladesh.

The government is likely to introduce t he Citizenship (Amendment) Bill to ensure that non-muslims left out of the NRC get a chance to become Indian citizens. It may also bring another major labour reform bill on industrial relations. During the previous Parlament session, the government was able to clear as many as 28 bills. In last two years, winter sessions have been convened on November 21 and ended in the first week of January.