Do we, the Indian middle class, see the corruption within us? I was too busy being corrupt to join Anna Hazare’s camp last week. For four days, I heard nothing but stories of our Tahrir Square-like revolution against the corrupt unfurling right under our noses in Delhi’s Jantar Mantar. But it was school admission time and I had some serious palm-greasing, document-fudging, string-pulling, weight-throwing and tout-chasing to do. I had...

Misleading data cited in a seminar paper on the situation of the minority community in the State tend to detract from the Left Front government's exceptional record on this count. Abusaleh Shariff, the Chief Economist of the National Council of Applied Economic Research, who was the Member-Secretary of the Sachar Committee, presented a paper on the socio-economic development of Muslims in West Bengal, at a seminar organised by the Institute of...

That accountability is vital in a democracy was reinforced at a National Convention of the National Campaign for the People's Right to Information held in Shillong recently… If governments do not investigate corruption, people should have the right and power to do so themselves. When the idea of a people's legal right to information took initial shape in the dusty villages of Rajasthan nearly two decades ago amidst people's struggles for...

Jharkhand now boasts a healthy literacy figure of 67.63 per cent, up by almost 14 per cent since 2001. Thanks to the centrally-sponsored Sarva Siksha Abhiyan, almost all the 32,000 villages in the state now have schools compared to only 16,000 in 2000. Provisional census data released today suggests that literacy figures improved from 54 per cent in 2001 to nearly 68 per cent. Male literacy increased from 67 per cent in...

Egypt, Tunisia and now — Jantar Mantar. That’s what a gaggle of School Students felt Anna Hazare’s protest site had become. “Tunisia, Egypt and now India,” said one banner. Teenager Ankita, who held aloft the poster, said she could not hold herself back. “A revolution is on. And I wanted to pitch in,” said the Class XII student of a reputable city school. Schoolmate Ashish Parikh nodded. “It is the tipping point.” They were...