-Reuters Rome: Governments are failing to fund projects to improve access to toilets and other sanitation services in poor countries because the subject remains "taboo", a director at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation said on Monday. "Who wants to talk about shit?" asked Frank Rijsberman, Director of Water, Sanitation and Hygiene at the $ 34 billion charitable foundation, during an interview with Reuters on Monday. "It's the last big taboo and as...

Rudyard Kipling opens his superb novel with the street urchin Kim teasing the son of a wealthy man. Kim kicks Chota Lal, whose father, Lala Dinanath, is worth half-a-million sterling, off the trunnion of the mighty cannon Zam-Zammah. Kipling loved India and wrote that it was the only democratic place in the world. It warms us to read this, but of course this was quite untrue in Kipling’s time and...

-The Hindu “Hectic lobbying by private interests in education is responsible for Karnataka being a laggard among Indian States in implementing the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act,” said a senior government official on Thursday. Karnataka and Goa are the only States that are yet to notify rules that will enforce the legislation that guarantees education as a fundamental right to all children aged between six and...

-PTI BHOPAL: A city-based engineering major has inked an agreement with a Denmark-based firm and the Defence Research Organisation to develop 'green toilets' for railways in a bid to keep trains, platforms and tracks clean and free from filth and corrosion. "Under the railways ambitious green toilet scheme two types of toilets based on vacuum and bacteria technology would be installed in trains in order to keep them green and clean," Daulat...

The Supreme Court in its verdict on the constitutionality of the Right to Education Act in relation to the reservation of seats for Economically Weaker Section [EWS] and socially disadvantaged [SD] children has rightly upheld the principle of integration. It is hard to see how it could have been any other way. In fact, the arguments against segregation and in favour of diversity in schools have long been settled in...