Rs 293.53 crore for Tripura

NOTED Assamese print-maker and painter Noni Borpuzari will now figure among the top printmakers of the world. He has been selected for inclusion in the Directory of Print, 2003, an electronic documentation prepared by the International Print Triennial Society, Poland, that reflects the state of world’s contemporary graphics. Recipient of several international and national fellowships and a council member of the Srimanta Sankaradeva Kalakshetra, Guwahati, Borpuzari is also the lone artist from India whose works are on permanent display in Majdanek Museum, Poland, which is exclusively dedicated to paintings and prints that appeal against wars.

Awareness on Assam amphibians

GREEN Society is a small group of wildlife activists whose efforts to conserve small reptiles and amphibians in Assam’s Darrang district would have gone unnoticed had it not been for Dr Anne Marie Ohler, a Paris-based scholar. Ohler, curator of amphibians in Natural History Museum, Paris, who was in Mangaldoi — the Darrang district headquarters — last week not only visited the remote areas of the district to determine the awareness efforts made by Green Society, but also called for a state-wide campaign to save the amphibians and reptiles.

Concern for a Little Girl

NOBODY in Guwahati had ever met or seen Barnali Deb. The eight-year old was travelling from Agartala in Tripura to Dimapur in Nagaland via Guwahati by bus, and stopped to spend a night at a private bus station in the Assam capital with her family. Soon after she fell asleep, she was picked up by four persons — all employees of the private bus company — gang-raped, murdered and dumped in a sewage tank before the sun rose. While the police swung into action and arrested the culprits within 10 hours of the crime, even more remarkable is the reaction of the people of Guwahati. The city has been witnessing protest rallies by different women’s and students’ groups every day since July 6. The crime occurred on July 4.