Court settles the class issue, but the real challenges of RTE have to be met The debate over the Right to Education is beginning to display characteristic symptoms of Indian debates. Elites are inventing specious arguments to condone the economic apartheid in the current system. But India’s self-appointed anti-elites are often even more elitist. They are more fixated on taking down elites a peg or two rather than intelligently fixing real...

-The Hindustan Times After the spacious confines of Rashtrapati Bhavan, it would appear that President Pratibha Patil would like to move to an accommodation of the sort she is used to and then some. Ms Patil finds herself at the heart of a controversy in which she has been allotted around 2.60 lakh square feet of land in the Pune cantonment area to build a post-retirement home. Now Rashtrapati Bhavan may go...

The high-handedness of the Trinamool government in West Bengal has now raised international concern. This time it's the arrest of Partho Sarothi Ray, a molecular biologist of international repute. National Advisory Council member Aruna Roy and renowned intellectual Noam Chomsky and more than four dozen other prominent scientists and public figures from across India and other countries have written to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to get the academician released after...

-The Telegraph The manner in which a professor and a retired engineer were arrested and locked up for over 16 hours in Calcutta has blown the lid off a tactic increasingly being employed in Bengal to intimidate or settle scores with dissenters. The weapon of mass-scale harassment is an oft-mentioned but little-understood piece of paper called the FIR or first information report. The method is scary — a word that cropped up several...

Over the past week, I’ve chronicled my investigative research on starvation in India – a project I’ve been working on with a colleague from the Centre for Equity Studies, a New Delhi think tank. We’ve told stories of people who were forced to eat poisoned roots to stay alive; a family that suffered the deaths of members from three different generations in a span of 24 hours; a woman faced with...