The Ahmedabad Metropolitan Magistrate on Tuesday declared that the Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigation Team had not found any evidence for prosecuting Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi and top bureaucrats and police officers and recommended that the investigation in the 2002 Gulberg Society massacre case be closed. Though magistrate M.S. Bhatt did not pronounce the court's decision on the closure report, he ordered the SIT to give a copy of it, within...

-The Pioneer Almost 95.2 per cent of schools are not compliant with the complete set of Right to Education (RTE) infrastructure indicators. These shocking statistics came to light in the two-day RTE Stocktaking Convention which was recently held. The Convention aimed to address the pending gaps and detect the reasons behind the schools missing out on the deadline to meet the basic standard of education as highlighted by the RTE. The RTE...

When universities start censoring speech and banning books, and permission is needed to hold conferences, we risk becoming a hollow, illiberal democracy. Do you need the administration's prior permission to hold a meeting, seminar, symposium or conference at a university? Most academics in liberal democracies would either be astounded by the question or feel compelled to answer it with an emphatic, if not vehement, no. The administration, they would argue, should...

Human-animal conflict, difficult terrain come in their way Until about two-and-a-half years ago, 10-year-old K. Nagaraj would go to Kovai Courtrallam every day, where he hawked fruits and snacks to tourists. On one such day, officials of the National Child Labour Project found the lad selling titbits and whisked him away to the special centre for rehabilitating child workers at Karunya Nagar, about 30-km west of Coimbatore. Nagaraj who was admitted to class...

Civil society pressure may have forced the government to keep proposed changes in the Right To Information (RTI) Act in abeyance but the information officers are quietly implementing them.   The government has proposed restrictions on RTI applications that only one issue can be raised in one application and it should not be more than 250 words. But, it had to withdraw amendments following objection by RTI proponents such as National Advisory...