-The Economic Times The Supreme Court has upheld the constitutional validity of the Right to Education (RTE) Act. Constitutional validity does not mean sense - after all, being stupid is not illegal. Public opinion is most exercised about all schools, even those that get no aid from government, being asked to provide 25% of their seats free to poor students.  The court has pronounced this a blow for affirmative action. Private schools...

Over the past week, I’ve chronicled my investigative research on starvation in India – a project I’ve been working on with a colleague from the Centre for Equity Studies, a New Delhi think tank. We’ve told stories of people who were forced to eat poisoned roots to stay alive; a family that suffered the deaths of members from three different generations in a span of 24 hours; a woman faced with...

Reservation will change their character, says Supreme Court The Supreme Court on Thursday held that the Right to Education Act would not apply to unaided minority schools. The majority judgment by Chief Justice S.H. Kapadia and Justice Swatanter Kumar said: “Reservation of 25 per cent in such unaided minority schools will result in changing the character of the schools if the right to establish and administer such schools flows from the right...

-The Indian Express SC rightly upholds equity in private schools — now govt schools should pull their socks up The Supreme Court has upheld the Right to Education Act and its 25 per cent quota for children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds in all schools — public, private and in-between (except minority unaided institutions). It dismissed the petition of certain private schools, which argued that the directive to admit these children was unconstitutional,...

-The Hindu Now that the Supreme Court has upheld the constitutional validity of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009, the Centre and the States must do their utmost to provide eight years of good quality schooling to all children. The unsuccessful challenge to the Act, which went into effect on April 1, 2010, came from unaided private school managements who are required to set apart 25...