-The Pioneer We have to climb daily for 3 km across the hills on foot from our village in Uttarkashi district in Uttarakhand to Dodra Kwar village on Himachal border just to charge mobile set”, says Satrama, woman from Pujeli village in Uttarakhand. Her village is one of those 1,220 villages in hills of Uttarkashi that continues to grope in the dark since the past three years. The villagers are vociferously protesting...

-The Hindustan Times In the world of education, the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) is a globally recognised Indian brand and so it is hardly surprising that there is so much rush to join them. I went to IIT, so did my husband and father. To keep that 'tradition' alive, I wanted my son to join IIT. And like many other parents, I moved to Kota, considered the 'Mecca' of IIT...

-The Telegraph IIT faculty today invoked Jawaharlal Nehru to protect the schools’ autonomy, accusing the Union HRD ministry of “political interference” by proposing a single engineering entrance exam. The IIT faculty federation issued a statement saying its fight was “to protect the academic excellence and autonomy of the institutions envisioned by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru from any political interference”. The statement, issued by faculty federation secretary Atul Mittal, came a day after HRD minister...

-The Economic Times The Union Cabinet is expected to take up for approval a bill that deals with manual scavenging and rehabilitation of scavengers.  For nearly two years now, the Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council has been advocating for a new law to deal with the indignities of manual scavenging and for their rehabilitation. Gandhi had, in November 2010, written to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh asking the government to take steps to...

-The Hindu In yet another move to curb wasteful expenditure after launching an austerity drive in Ministries, Central departments as also autonomous bodies, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee on Thursday pitched for streamlining the delivery mechanism for distributing subsidised commodities such as food ration, cooking gas and all other targeted government schemes for the ‘Aadhaar' platform. In a letter to Chief Ministers of 16 States and Union territories, Mr. Mukherjee said: “...given the...