-Live Mint Almost all of us have, through the unfortunate experience of a relative, an acquaintance or a friend, been exposed to the trauma of suicide; personally I have been associated with such an experience thrice. This unnatural and often violent form of death left me confounded (I never saw it coming) and hugely frustrated (at the loss that could have been prevented with timely help). For more than a decade, the...

To take stock of the status of the implementation of the Right to Education (RTE) Act and to identify issues that need urgent attention, a convention was held by the RTE forum. AMBARISH RAI, national convenor, RTE Forum talks to Aaditi Isaac The deadline for the implementation of the RTE Act is fast approaching, where do we stand? This Act was made for 250 million children. After two years of the...

-The Indian Express If only committees moved this fast on issues other than censorship The six-member committee appointed by HRD Minister Kapil Sibal to examine the content of NCERT textbooks for “educationally inappropriate material” may have failed in its very purpose by delivering its report in just 45 days. After all, the institution of the committee was created as a procrastinatory tool to give governments some breathing room. Mostly, a committee is...

-Outlook A girl from small-town Bihar has big ideas She travelled to Norway when she was barely 12 years old to speak on energy conservation. At least switch to CFL and LED, she had pleaded. That was four years ago. Her village in Dumka, Bihar, still has no electricity. At Rio this month, Shweta Marandi gave a one-and-a-half hour presentation on the same subject and was invited to visit Rome and...

Indications are that many civilians were killed in the counterinsurgency operation In the early hours of Friday, about six hundred troopers from the Central Reserve Police Force and the Combat Battalion for Resolute Action (CoBRA) commando unit conducted an operation in Chhattisgarh’s Bijapur district in which 18 tribal villagers were killed and six CRPF troopers injured. Two suspected Maoists were killed in Sukma in an unrelated incident the same day. As per the...