-The Economic Times The Rajya Sabha on Tuesday passed an amendment to the Right to Education Act. The amendment will widen the beneficiary net for disabled children and provide those with severe disability the option of receiving education at home. It will also give school management committees an advisory role in minority schools, both aided and unaided, and will put madarsas and vedic schools and other institutions providing primarily religious instruction outside...

What better elixir than pure water? Thanks to Naandi, a safe drinking water programme, 3,90,536 households in rural areas across four Indian states are benefited.  Naandi, headquartered in Hyderabad, is a not-for-profit organization which works with governing bodies in rural areas, including Karnataka, to provide clean drinking water to the poor. So what really is their modus operandi? It is essentially a community-run programme where the local governing body or gram...

-PTI Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit Wednesday said it was not fair to expect schools to take in children from economically weaker sections (EWS) when a cap on their fees and charges had also been imposed. “One unfortunate things is to put a cap on their (private schools) charges. Now, that is also not fair, because remember that primary schools have to meet their expenditures,” Dikshit said. She said while government could meet...

Court settles the class issue, but the real challenges of RTE have to be met The debate over the Right to Education is beginning to display characteristic symptoms of Indian debates. Elites are inventing specious arguments to condone the economic apartheid in the current system. But India’s self-appointed anti-elites are often even more elitist. They are more fixated on taking down elites a peg or two rather than intelligently fixing real...

A fourth of school students will need to be from less-privileged sections of society following an SC ruling on the RTE Act. While this can bring in social transformation, there are implementation challenges. Educationists share some solutions with Labonita Ghosh  Problem 1: WHO WILL FOOT THE BILL?  The government has offered to pay for the 25% of less-privileged students who will now have to be admitted into private schools, but it's not...