It is essential for India to raise the level of public expenditure in education to ensure quality. THE failure of the Indian state more than six decades after Independence to provide universal access to quality schooling and to ensure equal access to higher education among all socio-economic groups and across gender and region must surely rank among the more dismal and significant failures of the development project in the country....

-PTI   Several political parties on Tuesday pledged their support to journalists and non-journalists who staged a day-long dharna across the country to protest against the “delay” in notification of the Wage Boards for them and promised to raise the issue in Parliament. Senior leaders of the BJP, the CPI(M), the CPI and the JD(U) alleged that the government was “dithering” on the issue as “it wants to serve the interests of...

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will chair the full-fledged meeting of the Planning Commission next month to approve the ‘Approach Paper' to the 12th Five Year Plan (2012-17) that is likely to focus on raising economic growth to 9-9.5 per cent. Officials in the Finance Ministry said the approach paper would provide the broad framework of the government policy to be pursued in the five-year period to achieve the desired growth rate....

With the Right of all Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act mandating a 30:1 teacher pupil ratio and laying down minimum qualifications for teachers, state governments have expressed concerns about the lack of infrastructure to provide the required training. Only diploma-holders in elementary education are allowed to teach students from Class I to V and there is a shortage of teachers in this category. As per the HRD Ministry, of the...

RTI activist Akhil Gogoi, who was arrested from Guwahati Press Club, was remanded to three days’ police custody. He was arrested for criminal offences for damaging public property, interference in the working of government officials on duty, physically harming government officials, illegally organising meetings, engaging in public fight, accomplishing crime through accomplices, carrying weapons to destroy public property etc. during a protest march against eviction drive of the state government....