RTE implementation must focus on improving standards in government schools The provision for reserving 25 per cent seats in Class I for private unaided schools in the Right to Education Act is a red herring. About 30 per cent of the 76 lakh primary school children in Karnataka go to unaided private schools, mostly in urban areas, according to District Information System for Education (DISE) data. A 25 per cent reservation...

The Supreme Court on Friday pulled up the Kerala government for enacting legislation to circumvent its or High Court judgments. Kerala was the only State where it was telling citizens not to obey the law, said a Bench of Justices D.K. Jain and Anil R. Dave. Hearing an appeal against an interim order of the Kerala High Court staying a provision of the Kerala Public Ways (Restriction of Assemblies and Processions)...

The time has come for optimal pricing of water and power to prevent an unlimited pumping of groundwater and aid better coordination amongst competing demands for the scarce resource, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said here on Tuesday. Dr. Singh's observations come at a time when there is a debate on the pricing of water and privatisation of services in the sector. The Ministry of Water Resources is working on a reforms-oriented...

-Express News Service Terming the existing institutional and legal structures of water management in the country as “inadequate”, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Tuesday advocated for “urgent” reforms and batted for an “overarching national legal framework” for the governance of the sector.   Inaugurating India Water Week, which will be celebrated in April every year from now, Singh said: “One of the problems in achieving better management is that the current institutional and...

-The Wall Street Journal These days, Indian policymakers are debating how to create a vast new food entitlement program. There is talk of poor households struggling to cope with high food prices and malnourishment among their children. What you don’t hear much about, however, is the most tragic and outrageous consequence of India’s failure to feed its people adequately: starvation deaths. India is a nation that prides itself on having been self-sufficient in...