A war of words has erupted between the chief ministers of Bihar and Gujarat. Bihar's chief minister Nitish Kumar has slammed Narendra Modi for taking potshots at the state's slow socio-economic growth. The altercation began with Modi saying that caste politics has ruined states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Hitting back, Nitish has said that Modi should look at the conditions in his own state before criticising others. For the last...

In a fresh controversy over how the Mamata Banerjee regime takes criticism, the West Bengal Higher Education Department has sought an explanation from two government college teachers whether they took permission to take part in television discussions, in which they allegedly expressed “anti-government views.”  Debasish Sarkar, associate professor of Economics at Jhargram Raj College, and Shampa Sen, head of the Department of Bengali at Hooghly Mohsin College, have been asked to...

The state Higher Education department has issued a notice to Bengal Government College Teachers’ Association general secretary and noted economist Debashis Sarkar, asking him to explain why he made “anti-government comments” on TV. Sarkar, who teaches at Jhargram Raj College, is often invited to panel discussions on Bengali channels. The notice was issued after a retired college teacher, Subrata Panda, wrote to Education Minister Bratya Basu on May 26 alleging that Sarkar...

India is setting up a Rs.5,000 crore credit guarantee fund to facilitate easy education loans to needy students by providing protection against defaults to banks. The move was endorsed at a meeting of the Central Advisory Board on Education (CABE), the highest education advisory body to the government that comprises academicians, industry experts and state education ministers, human resource development (HRD) minister Kapil Sibal told reporters Wednesday. “CABE members endorsed the initiative to...

Call it a strategy to garner political support for passing pending key education Bills or a progressive measure to reduce caste bias in colleges and universities—the central government has put in place a set of rules that can possibly stop grants or cancel recognition of Higher Educational institutes engaging in such discrimination. The new rules set out by the University Grants Commission (UGC) aim to provide safeguards to students of reserved...