-The Hindustan Times Angry that unaided minority schools have been exempt from the Right to Education (RTE) Act, the Forum for Fairness in Education (FFIE) plans to file a public interest litigation (PIL) in the Bombay high court. FFIE is challenging a notification exempting schools from reserving seats for children from economically weak families. The latest RTE notification, uploaded on a government website on March 20, said unaided minority schools will not...

-Live Mint HRD minister says government will push for the fulfilment of RTE's conditions even after deadline ends A week before the implementation deadline for its flagship Right to Education (RTE) Act expires, the government on Friday accepted that it had failed to achieve many of the targets of what it envisaged as a landmark measure. At least 13 states have written to the human resource development (HRD) ministry for an extension owing...

-The Business Standard The various grants under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan don't reach all schools - and not on time, either Educational spending is soaring. At the turn of the decade, new legislation has been enacted to make education a fundamental right. But India's elementary schoolchildren are just not learning. The country's elementary education budget has more than doubled since 2007-08, from Rs 68,853 crore to Rs 147,059 crore this fiscal, but the...

-The Business Standard Kolkata: Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee, Ford Foundation International professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has slammed the government's Right To Education (RTE) programme. This, he said, was only a step towards ensuring a means of livelihood for teachers. Banerjee said the programme, implemented in 2009, lacked sense. He said he wasn't hopeful about the outcome of the initiative. "It is simply for the teachers, by the teachers,...

-The Hindustan Times Mumbai: With the proposed government guidelines on the Right to Education Act nowhere in sight, many city schools have enrolled students under the 25% RTE quota, despite the risk that such admissions could be declared illegal later. The government notification containing guidelines and schedules for the implementation of the RTE Act was to be issued in November 2012. Many schools had delayed the admission schedule waiting for the notification...