-The Hindu   ‘They cannot charge for tuitions but only for extra facilities' Bangalore: A 37-year-old taxi driver, Manjunath Gowda (name changed), had brought a chocolate cake for his family after his six-year-old daughter secured a seat in a sought-after private school in Uttarahalli under a provision of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act 2009, which guarantees 25 per cent of the seats in private unaided schools to...

-The Hindu Even as the Maharashtra government congratulated itself for addressing issues of the transgender population in a draft policy announced earlier this month, one of the provisions of the policy, which states people being transgender can be prevented through medical care, has angered the marginalised community. By this, the government has failed to acknowledge that being transgender is a choice of many people, the community's empathisers say. The draft of the...

-The Business Standard Kolkata: Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee, Ford Foundation International professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has slammed the government's Right To Education (RTE) programme. This, he said, was only a step towards ensuring a means of livelihood for teachers. Banerjee said the programme, implemented in 2009, lacked sense. He said he wasn't hopeful about the outcome of the initiative. "It is simply for the teachers, by the teachers,...

-The Times of India LUCKNOW: The government has spent crores on promoting Hindi in the country and abroad in recent years. A recent RTI query sent to the department of language (DOL) has revealed that Rs 348.90 crore was allocated between 2009 and 2012 to develop and promote the language. The DOL's reply to the RTI query justifies the largesse, saying that the money has been well spent. Anticipating the question why...

-The Hindu There is no Lokpal yet, but the Centre’s Grievance Redressal Bill promises to cut through bureaucracy and corruption that plague government services. The citizen is hoping for a repeat of the RTI Act story. A year after the UPA came to power in 2004, it brought the Right to Information Act, ushering in a revolution: citizens, for the first time, could access information under the control of public authorities, whether...