-The Telegraph Ranchi: Jharkhand High Court today adjourned a hearing on the Nagri land acquisition controversy till Monday but asked the state to begin a dialogue with villagers who have disrupted construction of campuses of three national academic institutes. A division bench comprising Chief Justice Prakash Tatia and Justice Jaya Roy allowed the adjournment since advocate-general Anil Sinha was away in New Delhi, but asked the state government to work out a...

Census 2011 data bring into the open Maharashtra’s terrible record in sex-selective abortions. In early June, Vijaymala Patekar, a mother of four girls, haemorrhaged to death at a hospital in Parli, Beed district, Maharashtra. She was reportedly in her second trimester of pregnancy. Her family had allegedly forced her to abort the foetus when they learnt it was a girl child. Sudam Munde, the doctor who performed the procedure, fled Parli but...

-The Times of India   The Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed that the government had reasons to doubt its verdict laying down auction as the only way of allocating natural resources, in what is seen as an indication of a significant judicial rethink.  "On cancellation of spectrum licences allotted without following a transparent system, there is no doubt about its correctness. But if one reads the judgment to mean that auction must be...

-The Deccan Chronicle Following the age old practice of trying to circumvent the law, schools which did not enjoy a minority status, have begun vying for it to avoid admitting poor students under the Right to Education (RTE) Act. Sensing trouble, the state government has come up with a strategy of its own to defeat them at their own game. Much to the horror of the institutions concerned, it announced after...

'No child shall be subjected to physical punishment and mental harassment', says clause 17, Chapter IV of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act. During a visit last week to a government school in JC Nagar, a group of 20 bare-footed children were seen practising 'attention' and 'stand at ease'. The Kannada medium students were intimidated not so much by the English commands as the trainer brandishing...