-The Hindu Madurai: No end to doubts raised and clarifications provided with respect to the Act even after three years The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act 2009 stipulates that private schools reserve 25 per cent of seats at the entry level for children belonging to ‘disadvantaged groups' and ‘weaker sections'. The Central Act originally defined a ‘child belonging to a disadvantaged group' as one belonging to...

-The Hindu Kolkata: The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) has taken suo motu cognisance of the death of a class III student at Basanti in West Bengal's South 24 Parganas district and sought a report from the State government. Bapi Joardar (10), a student of Nirdeshkhali Notunpara Sishu Siksha Kendra, died at the State-run SSKM hospital Friday morning after his schoolteacher allegedly banged his head against the wall...

-The Economic Times Arvind Panagariya, a professor of Indian economics at Columbia University, hits out at Nobel laureate and Harvard University professor Amartya Sen over his call to confront MPs with the "number of deaths" a delayed Food Security Bill can cause. The former chief economist at the Asian Development Bank counters Sen's argument that it is high social spending that has contributed to the economic growth of Asian economies such...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The UPA is strenuously denying that this campaign is its earthy version of the NDA's "India Shining" campaign, but few are buying the denials. Launched as a "multi-media" campaign to highlight its achievements in two successive terms at the Center, it has been christened by political observers are UPA's " Bharat Smiling" campaign. The spirit of the campaign, says the publicity material given out by the...

-The Hindu Students in government schools in Assam study only for two-and-a-half hours every day at the primary level compared to five-and-a-half to six-and-a-half hours in the rest of the country, an official study has shown. Similarly, the total number of working days in primary schools each year is 180 in Nagaland and Manipur and a maximum of 253 in Bihar and Jharkhand with lower than average literacy rates. But in most...