-The Times of India   Education institutes in Rajasthan are working day and night to prepare guidelines for effective implementation of the recent Supreme Court order allowing disclosure of answer sheets under Right to Education Act 2009. The order has highlighted the poor situation of universities and colleges, where students face problems like staff crunch and infrastructure. Rajasthan Technical University is overburdened with work. To put examination and declaration of results on...

Do agencies like the Ford Foundation push their own agenda through the NGOs they support? It’s often said, tongue in cheek, that India’s “shadow” government works out of the nondescript, low-slung buildings abutting the Lodhi Garden in Delhi. That’s partly hubris, but it also stems from being close to the centre of power. This rarefied zone houses powerful “cultural” institutions like the India International Centre, as well as a host...

Anna Hazare’s fast is over, but the conjuncture of which that fast was an episode is not: Hazare’s own movement, or other similar movements, are bound to recur in the coming months. The question naturally arises: what are these movements all about? And to start with: what was Hazare’s own movement all about? It was certainly not about “corruption” in any definable sense. That word meant different things to the...

Considered reformists in the Manmohan Singh government, HRD minister Kapil Sibal and Planning Commission deputy chairperson Montek Singh Ahluwalia are not on the same side when it comes to Foreign Education Providers Bill and a slew of other educational legislations being planned by the HRD ministry. Ahluwalia's criticism has come out in the latest WikiLeaks disclosures. After a lot of initial enthusiasm, the HRD ministry is going slow on Foreign Education...

India should facilitate private sector growth in higher education, particularly in technical subjects, and should explore and develop innovative public-private partnerships (PPP) in the 12th Five-year Plan In a potential game-changer for India’s education sector, the Planning Commission has suggested that the country allow establishing institutes of higher learning that could be run for profit. “The not-for-profit tag in higher education sector should perhaps be re-examined in a more pragmatic manner so...