-The Indian Express The Haryana state government had turned down a suggestion to drop the educational criteria In a first, the Supreme Court on Thursday upheld a new law in Haryana, mandating minimum educational qualification as a pre-requisite for the candidates contesting panchayat polls. A bench led by Justice J Chelameswar dismissed a batch of petitions that had challenged the validity of the amendment in the pertinent law. The court ruled that the...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The government said it will bring a comprehensive law to criminalize marital rape by amending the IPC and was awaiting the Law Commission report on the issue. "The issue of marital rape is very complicated and it is very difficult to explain and describe it. These are of such extreme private nature and no records of any consent are available. The matter has been dealt in...

-The Hindu The observation by the Supreme Court that political leaders should not take criticism as a personal insult highlights a particular kind of intolerance that is rarely referred to in the ongoing debate on the subject: the inability of public figures to tolerate criticism and their repeated resort to criminal defamation proceedings to stifle adverse comment. Nothing exemplifies this as much as the 100-odd prosecutions launched by the government of...

-Business Standard Proposals are in public domain for consultation with stakeholders, coaching institutes are unhappy with suggestion of a watchdog Like Gopal, the hapless protagonist of Chetan Bhagat's bestselling novel Revolution 2020, thousands of students spend fortunes every year at coaching classes, hoping to get through a premier engineering college. The Rs 2.4 lakh crore unregulated segment could, however, soon be under the watchful eyes of a regulator, if the Ashok Misra committee...

-The Indian Express Education outcomes may have declined under the RTE, but scrapping the no-detention policy is not the answer. In the five years since the potentially transformative Right to Education Act (RTE) was implemented, several studies have documented the decline and stagnation of learning levels in school. The Annual Status of Education Reports have painted a dismal picture. Most children emerge from primary school lacking even rudimentary arithmetic and reading...