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....

The co-chairperson of the Joint Drafting Committee on the Lokpal Bill, Shanti Bhushan, has urged Union Finance Minister and chairman of the Lokpal panel Pranab Mukherjee to treat the two drafts as the outcome of the joint committee and not to treat the Team Anna draft as a “dissent note.” In a letter to Mr. Mukherjee, Mr. Bhushan took exception to Union Law Minister Veerappa Moily's statement calling the government draft...

-The Hindu   Seventeen people have died and over nine lakh people have been affected in the nearly fortnight-long spell of rains in West Bengal. Ten districts have been affected by heavy floods, Disaster Management Minister Javed Khan has said in the Assembly. He said that 25,750 mud houses have been damaged or washed away due to the rains caused by a depression. The districts affected were Malda, Murshidabad, Purba Medinipur, Howrah, North...

TODAY, India is considered around the world as a rapidly developing country posting economic growth rates of around 8-9 percent consistently over the last several years. Along with China, which is much further ahead, India is seen as a powerhouse of the global economy in the decades to come and already it is home to a very large number of dollar billionaires, perhaps the largest such number in Asia. In...

  Can we agree in this country on a floor of human dignity below which we will not allow any human being to fall? No child, woman or man in this land will sleep hungry. No person shall be forced to sleep under the open sky. No parent shall send their child out to work instead of to school. And no one shall die because they cannot afford the cost of...