A CBI probe has indicted a former chairman of India’s technical education regulator for approving increased student intake by a private engineering college 10 years ago despite the institution lacking adequate infrastructure. The indictment of R. Natarajan comes days after the agency had nailed the now-suspended All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) chairman, R.A. Yadav, in another corruption case. Natarajan was head of the AICTE when the regulator allowed the Chennai-based...

Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has said recreating Nalanda University would not be easy and that it needed a scientific attitude and disciplined thought and the inspiration for this could come from old Nalanda itself. At the Indian Science Congress in Chennai today, Sen said: “The meeting here gives me an opportunity to recollect the pursuit of science in old Nalanda which will inspire and guide our long-run efforts in new Nalanda.” Sen...

‘For the Indian media, the key question is one of covering mass deprivation' Time to rediscover concept of freedom of press in Marxist terms: Sashi Kumar N. Ram, Editor-in-Chief of The Hindu, has called for “bold and radical” ways to check the ethical failings of the media. Inaugurating a seminar ‘Whither Media,' organised as part of the three-day Third International Congress on Kerala Studies, which concluded here on Monday, Mr. Ram said that...

Indian civil society was dismayed and horror-struck when human rights activist Dr Binayak Sen, who has spent over three decades caring for the poor in tribal areas of central India, was sentenced to life imprisonment for ‘sedition’ along with two others, Piyush Guha and Narayan Sanyal by a Raipur Sessions Court judge.  Protests are taking place everywhere in the country and the members of India’s vibrant civil society, peoples’ movements,...

Two hundred families from 40 ‘Black Spot' villages, that were notorious for brewing hooch and selling in Dharmapuri District have been rehabilitated by the Prohibition and Enforcement Wing (PEW), thanks to the efforts of Additional Superintendent of Police P. Saravanan. R. Sudhakar, District Superintendent of Police told The Hindu that the district police identified these villages and conducted social awareness campaigns at regular intervals. As part of this initiative, the PEW wing...