Today, we have reached a historic milestone in our country's struggle for children's right to education. The Constitution (86th Amendment) Act, 2002, making elementary education a Fundamental Right, and its consequential legislation, the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009, comes into force today. The enforcement of this right represents a momentous step forward in our 100-year struggle for universalising elementary education. Over the years, the demand...

The proposed Food Security Bill should adopt a three-pronged strategy that constitutes a Universal Public Distribution System for all, low-cost foodgrains to the needy, and convergence in the delivery of nutrition safety net programmes.  In his latest budget speech, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee announced: “We are now ready with the draft Food Security Bill which will be placed in the public domain very soon.” Although no official draft has been...

Nearly one third of Muslims in the nation survive on less than Rs 550 a month, economic think tank NCAER said, amid the ongoing debate on reservations in jobs and educational institutions for those belonging to the community. A survey by the National Council for Applied Economic Research (NCAER) said that three out of every 10 Muslims were below poverty line and lived on less than Rs 550 a month...

Jharkhand has decided to seriously monitor deaths of mothers, during child delivery or as a result of extraneous circumstances, having woken up to its dismal health record that is nowhere near the UN’s millennium goals. Jharkhand’s maternal mortality rate or MMR — the number of maternal deaths per one lakh live births in a year — stands at 371, while the national average is 312. But as a signatory to...

Three men were on Saturday sentenced to life imprisonment after being convicted of murdering National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) engineer Satyendra Dubey, the young whistle-blower who had exposed corruption in a national highway project in Bihar, seven years ago. Mantu Kumar, Udai Kumar and Pinku Ravidas were handed the life sentence by a special CBI court judge Raghvendra Singh, who held them guilty of the murder of the 31-year-old IIT-Kanpur...