Teachers, forget the word scold if you want to steer clear of trouble — or even jail. The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights has said no teacher can discriminate or mentally abuse a child based on his/her physical disability, caste, colour, gender or religion. Its new guidelines, which have to be ratified by the human resource development ministry, also forbid teachers from using sarcasm, humiliating adjectives, ridicule based on a...

The rate of poverty, based on the number of people living on less than $1.5 a day, declined across the developing world between 2005 and 2008, according to a World Bank report. Around 1.29 billion people lived below the defined poverty line in 2008, which was equivalent to 22 per cent of the population of the developing world. By contrast, 1.94 billion belonged to this extreme poverty category in 1981. The...

In the context of the suicide by a reserved category first year student at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences on March 3, a recent decision of the Institute Body (IB) and the Governing Body (GB) points, on the one hand, to total insensitivity of the institute's administration to the problems of the SCs/STs, and, on the other, how politician-members of these apex bodies seem to influence the decisions...

Number of girls who disappeared from Bengal last year — 3,000. Over 5,000 children went missing in 2010. But the state doesn’t seem to be bothered. “During an inquiry we found that Bengal is yet to set up anti-trafficking cells in districts to evolve a foolproof mechanism for combating trafficking. The police administration does not seem concerned even though trafficking of girls is on the rise,” said a CBI official attached to...

States are opposed to provisions of the bill that seek to mandate who are the beneficiaries of the proposed law The UPA can face a political alignment against the National Food Security bill similar to what it did on the National Counter Terrorism Centre (NCTC). Major states are opposed to provisions of the bill that seek to mandate who are the beneficiaries of the proposed law.  J Jayalalithaa in Tamil Nadu, Nitish...