-The United Nations   The United Nations launched a new web portal today focusing on helping girls and women access job opportunities, training and career advice in the information and communication technology (ICT) sector. The website – girlsinict.org – was designed to inspire and help young women between the ages of 11 and 25 prepare for and pursue careers in technology by providing them with useful resources such as links to scholarships, internships,...

A government-appointed panel has suggested launching online higher education courses, a step experts said would not only widen access to knowledge but also check irregularities in distance learning. Apart from permission to universities and deemed universities to offer courses through the Internet, the committee has recommended that the government set up a Distance Education Council of India (DECI) as regulator. Fourteen open universities and 172 other institutions now offer distance education to...

The arbitrary deletion of A.K. Ramanujan’s ‘Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation’ from the syllabus of a concurrent course taught by the History Department by the Academic Council of the University of Delhi has understandably sparked off a major debate. The prehistory of this step is to be traced to early 2008 when ABVP activists attacked and vandalised the office of the History Department in the...

Notification of rules is a step forward, but a lot more needs to be done A bunch of children selling toys at a traffic signal, small boys cleaning tables at restaurants or washing glasses at tea shops or little girls engaged as baby sitters – the effective implementation of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009, will possibly make such instances a thing of the past. However, for...

The State's public education system faces the threat of dilution from several quarters. WHEN a national law is finally in place to ensure that not a single child is out of school, there is a growing concern in Kerala, which already has a well-established, though languishing, public education system, about the United Democratic Front (UDF) government's moves to sanction a large number of private, unaided schools. The decision to issue no...