Each year boys max out seats at the Indian Institutes of Technology. But the count of girls who secured JEE ranks has doubled to 2,886 since the last edition of the exam. Yet, the tech schools will on another front continue to be an unequal world: students from the IIT-Bombay zone (home to Kota) dominate the list of selected candidates. But the southern zone has bagged the credit for having...

Recent events in Parliament concerning a National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) textbook use of a Shankar cartoon of Babasaheb Ambedkar have correctly drawn outrage and public debate. General outrage has also been correctly expressed at the attack on Suhas Palshikar's office in Pune - apparently for his role as chief advisor of the offending textbook. In his statement, human resource development minister Kapil Sibal has chosen to limit...

A parliamentary panel has cited the practice in developed countries to reject a key provision in the land acquisition bill allowing the government to acquire plots for private companies. The committee said in the US, Japan and Canada, land is purchased by private enterprises, not acquired by the state. Why should India continue this “anomalous practice”, asked the parliamentary standing committee on rural development in its report on the Land Acquisition,...

A parliamentary panel has sought to put strict safeguards on the government’s powers to acquire land and recommended that no plot under cultivation be taken away unless as a last resort. The recommendation — one of many on the Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill, 2011 — seeks to give a leg-up to food security, but if accepted, could pose a challenge to the expansion of industries. “The concept of food security...

The grand old  man of Indian cartooning RK Laxman has a delightful anecdote that embodies the charm of  political cartooning. Soon after the 1962 Sino-Indian war, Laxman lampooned Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and his much-maligned defence minister Krishna Menon. That evening, Laxman got a call from the prime minister’s office. Picking up the phone, he was petrified of being at the receiving end of Nehru’s ire. He need not have...