-Deccan Herald The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) has directed the Karnataka government to submit a report within four weeks on the allegation that a private school in Bangalore cut off tufts of hair of four children, admitted under the Right to Education Act quota. The Commission has also sought to know from the chief secretary whether any action had been initiated against the school authorities.  The four students were admitted to first...

-Mail Online India Concerned over the rigidity of some provisions of the Right to Education Act, members of the National Advisory Council (NAC) are working on a report recommending review of the norms and standards laid down for schools under the legislation. The NAC, led by Congress chief Sonia Gandhi, has been advising the central government on the effective implementation of the provisions of the RTE Act. Calling the Act as excessively 'input-driven',...

-The Business Standard No movement yet on quality control in higher education The state of professional higher education in India is abysmal. Consider engineering. All told, there are 1.5 million engineering seats in the country. Almost a third of these are unfilled, so about a million engineers are produced every year. Yet, barely 10 per cent of them are readily employable. About a quarter don’t know enough English to make sense...

-The Telegraph Guwahati: A 15-member CBI team, led by deputy inspectors-general of police Anurag Garg and Arun Bothra, will probe the Assam violence. Besides Garg, DIG from CBI special crime zone (I), and Bothra, DIG from the CBI special crime zone (II), the team has two superintendents of police and 11 officers of subordinate ranks. An official source today said the CBI team had set up office at the Bongaigaon Refinery & Petrochemicals...

-The Times of India NAGPUR: The state education department has moved into an aggressive mode on learning that 10 lakh students have ditched government schools (zilla parishad and corporation) and shifted to private institutions in the last five years. The revelation came from Sanjay Deshmukh, director of Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan (SSA) and the man leading RTE implementation in Maharashtra. "Five years ago we had about 78 lakh students, now the figure has...