-The Times of India The government has maintained that NCERT is an autonomous body. Well, if the insistence is correct, the cartoons which triggered a political storm should stay in the textbooks.  A month before the row over the cartoons erupted, leading to the decision to banish them, NCERT had defended their use in textbooks, even telling the National Commission for SCs that there was nothing offensive about the B R Ambedkar...

Parliament is now a body of fragile selves. They won’t draw a sword for liberty Is the controversy over the Ambedkar cartoon in the NCERT textbook a sign of a deeper intellectual and cultural malaise? The plot line is eerily familiar. One set of politicians raises, in this case falsely, the apprehension that a cartoon is offensive. There is a high-pitched debate. Members of an offended community accuse others of insensitivity...

Jatav residents of Ramgarh in U.P. resist attempts by members of a powerful community to grab their land by violent means. IN what could be considered one of the worst incidents of vendetta against dalits in the National Capital Region (NCR), members of the dalit Jatav community were beaten up brutally by some members of the dominant Gujjar community in Ramgarh village in the Greater Noida area of Uttar Pradesh...

As the government scrambles to contain the political damage from the Ambedkar cartoon, one may be tempted to believe that somebody surreptitiously slipped Shankar's satirical work in the NCERT textbook. Or that the HRD ministry was caught unawares by the political heresy.  However, the fact is that the books were released by NCERT after having been thoroughly vetted by a National Monitoring Committee appointed by the ministry which includes several civil...

Recently, the Indian Council of Social Science Research, the highest body that funds and guides the social sciences in India, has initiated an in-house debate about the current state and the future prospects of such research. What is the quality of work that has come out of our universities and research institutes over the past 10-20 years? Which new areas of inquiry deserve more time, money and attention in the...