The state government has decided to ask private schools to furnish details of their accounts to stop them from indiscriminately hiking fees. Although all private schools will be required to reveal the data, the government’s focus is on English-medium institutions as they have been frequently accused of raising fees arbitrarily. The state education department will soon send a circular to nearly 500 private English-medium schools — both unaided and partially aided (those...

MONA SANGWAN, a teacher at a private school in Delhi, who earns just Rs. 4,000 a month and is her family’s sole earning member, had nearly begun to despair. How on earth was she going to raise Rs. 7,000 every month to buy the medicines her brother Ashwini, a kidney transplant patient, needed? Mona would have continued to despair had not the NGO Sarvohit Social Welfare Society stepped in. And to...

It approves 26 per cent share in profits for local people The draft bill proposes setting up of a fund to pay beneficiaries Final legislation likely to be introduced in the winter session of Parliament The Group of Ministers (GoM), headed by Union Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, on Friday approved the new Mining Draft Bill, including the provision that mining companies share 26 per cent of profits with local people affected by their...

A task force, set up by the agriculture ministry, has recommended a slew of measures to increase India’s stagnating grain production. The panel has advised adoption of new technologies, water conservation and more efficient water management, especially in Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh—known as ‘the food bowl of India’. The task force also suggests taking green revolution to the eastern region. It is hopeful that the measures would check...

The government is likely to make it mandatory for mining companies to hand over a part of their revenues and make annual payments to land losers, bringing compensation rules in this sector in line with a policy followed by the Haryana government which has won the backing of Congress president Sonia Gandhi. But in a sop to companies, which have been unenthusiastic about earlier plans for profit-sharing, the ministry of...