Rural secondary school students in the Northeast have better reading and arithmetic skills than the rest of the nation, an education survey has revealed, though the numerical Knowledge in some states of the region is below the national average. The survey was conducted by volunteers of the Annual Status of Education Report under a Delhi-based NGO, Pratham, for the Union human resource development ministry. Among the Northeast states, Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram, Nagaland,...

While freedom of speech and expression is an individual right, its actualisation often relies on a vast infrastructure of intermediaries. In the offline world, this includes newspapers, television channels, public auditoriums, etc. It is often assumed that the internet has created a more robust public sphere of speech by doing away with many structural barriers to free speech. But the fact of the matter is that even if the internet enables...

The only way to fix the IT laws is to change the way they are made Laws in India relating to the internet are greatly flawed. The only way to fix them would be to fix the way they are made. The Cyber-Laws and E-Security Group in the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DEIT, ‘DeitY’ according to their website) has proved incapable of making balanced, informed laws and policies. The...

-The Telegraph Rural development minister Jairam Ramesh today criticised the media for reporting that he had offered to quit the government and work for the party, calling it “juvenile” and refusing to answer any political questions. “No political questions... the most juvenile media I have ever come across,” Ramesh told reporters at the beginning of a news conference convened to release the Wasteland Atlas of India. Sections of the media were abuzz yesterday...

Imagine you are a citizen racing across newspapers rapid fire. As you flip the pages you run across events like the Vedanta mining case, the Koodankulam nuclear controversy, the debate on poverty and reports about climate change. Each of these can be a life-threatening event and none of them have a life support system of Knowledge which allows them to be debated in the open. The basic information comes from...