The robust 9 per cent –plus growth in South Asia till 2010, driven largely by India, where it came down to around 7 per cent in 2011-12, had one major qualifier: it was mostly associated with a rapid rise in labour productivity rather than an expansion in employment, according to the latest report Global Employment Trends from International Labour Office. Up until the end of the millennium, that is just a...

Here is a new set of official statistics that can escalate the politically contentious debate on what constitutes the poverty line. If the average monthly consumption expenditure is taken as the benchmark of what an individual needs to survive, the poverty linewould be Rs 66.10 for urban areas and Rs 35.10 for rural regions, while about 65% of the population will be below this cutoff. The figures, based on the 66th round...

The metropolis could have had five new police stations had the government accepted the recommendation of a committee on VIP security cover. A high-ranking IPS officer told TOI on Friday that the committee had recommended the reduction or withdrawal of the security cover of leading politicians. "But shockingly , chief minister Prithviraj Chavan and home minister R R Patil have rejected the recommendation for obvious political reasons," he said. Ironically, the...

-Express News Service Chandigarh: Making it clear that the Right to Education (RTE) Act will have an overriding effect on all other regulations on the reservation of seats for the economically weaker sections (EWS), the Punjab and Haryana High Court has told the private schools to comply with the RTE Act and the latest Supreme Court judgment on the Act. Disposing of a bunch of petitions filed by private schools challenging various...

The Supreme Court in its verdict on the constitutionality of the Right to Education Act in relation to the reservation of seats for Economically Weaker Section [EWS] and socially disadvantaged [SD] children has rightly upheld the principle of integration. It is hard to see how it could have been any other way. In fact, the arguments against segregation and in favour of diversity in schools have long been settled in...