Third report in three months to highlight lack of quality education in India; poses risk to knowledge hub hopes Nearly two years after the Right to Education (RTE) Act was introduced with the promise of providing free and compulsory education to all primary school children, the learning outcome in the country has actually deteriorated in terms of quality. In yet another wake-up call for policymakers, the 2011 Annual Status of Education Report...

-The Telegraph   Team Anna will start its campaign in the five poll-bound states from Saturday, almost two weeks ahead of the earlier plan it had announced. The group said it would not ask voters to back or oppose any particular party but make them aware of every party’s stand on the Lokpal bill. Team Anna had earlier said it would start its campaign from February 3 in Uttar Pradesh. Its tour plan now...

-The Economist   Opposition to the world’s biggest biometric identity scheme is growing FOR a country that fails to meet its most basic challenges—feeding the hungry, piping clean water, fixing roads—it seems incredible that India is rapidly building the world’s biggest, most advanced, biometric database of personal identities. Launched in 2010, under a genial ex-tycoon, Nandan Nilekani, the “unique identity” (UID) scheme is supposed to roll out trustworthy, unduplicated identity numbers based on...

Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz today said he was aware of the problems industry was facing in acquiring land in Bengal and suggested that government role in facilitating acquisition could help reduce the difficulty. “I talked to some people and they said it’s (land acquisition) a problem here,” said Stiglitz, a professor of economics at Columbia University, during an interaction with journalists. The former chief economist at the World Bank expressed his...

The CBI has said that the multi-crore forestry scam in Haryana which was exposed by whistleblower Sanjiv Chaturvedi, a young forest official, is a fit case for it to investigate independently.  However, the agency will require clearance from both the Centre and the state government to investigate a case that many officials have attempted to scuttle over the last five years. The green signal may be difficult to get considering that...