Two years after the Right to Education Act (RTE) was passed, things are finally falling into place. As schools go about implementing the Act, the state education department is doing its bit to help out: On Wednesday, its Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan conducted training sessions for teachers at 10 schools in six wards. "The idea is to equip our teachers with teaching aides which will help them understand Continuous Comprehensive Evaluation and...

-The Indian Express   As indictments of the lower judiciary go, this one is pretty damning. Each and every sub-judge from Punjab and Haryana who sat for the qualifying exam for superior judicial service two months ago has flunked. Only two — one each from the general category and OBC — of 148 lawyers who appeared for the exam passed. All candidates — lawyers and sub-judges — were cleared in a preliminary test of...

Teacher running coaching centre wins appeal against M.P. Government The Supreme Court has directed the Madhya Pradesh Government to pay a compensation of Rs. 2 lakh to a teacher running a coaching centre for handcuffing and keeping him in police custody without any valid reason. A Bench of Justices Aftab Alam and Ranjana Desai, however, rejected appellant Hardeep Singh's plea for prosecution of the Jabalpur Collector and other government officials for want...

A report of the National People's Tribunal on the 2008 riots in Kandhamal, Orissa, is out. The report that runs into 197 pages points out that the brutality of the violence falls within the definition of 'torture' under international law, particularly the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.   According to the tribunal, headed by Justice A P Shah, communal forces used religious conversions as an issue for political mobilisation...

-The Telegraph    The text prepared for negotiations at the Durban global climate-change conference, where high-level discussions begin on Monday, is riddled with disagreements. The 131-page text, prepared by officials from the various governments, was released late on Saturday. It is full of brackets, The Telegraph has found, which means that some country or the other has not agreed to what has been written within the bracketed area. It’s clear that the 190-odd participating...