Union Human Resources Minister Kapil Sibal on Monday said the Centre will not budge on provisions of the Right to Education Act (RTE) including the neighbourhood school concept. “There is no question of relaxing any provision. Poor students need an opportunity to study in schools in their neighbourhood,” Sibal told reporters here. The Union Minister was in the City to deliver the Vithal N Chandavarkar Memorial Lecture on ‘Empowerment through Education’...

The Italian-born English poet Humbert Wolfe described the press of his day in the following terms: ''You cannot hope to bribe or twist, Thank God! The British journalist. But seeing what the man will do Unbribed, there’s no occasion to.'' Things have only got worse in this matter in the eighty-odd years since these words were written, and they have probably got worse in many more places. And so the age-old dilemma between freedom of...

The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI)’s ambitious plan of issuing a unique biometric-enabled number, innocuously called ‘aadhaar’, to every Indian resident has finally begun to generate a debate on citizen-State relations, privacy, financial implications, and operational practicalities. What the debate has largely missed so far, however, is the credibility of the UIDAI’s claims in the field of social policy, particularly the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) and Public Distribution...

Former Arunachal Pradesh Chief Minister and senior Congress leader Gegong Apang was on Tuesday arrested by sleuths of a Special Investigation Cell (SIC) probing the Rs. 1000-crore scam in Public Distribution System (PDS) in Arunachal Pradesh. Mr. Apang was arrested outside the SIC office and later produced before a court of Special Judge at Lakhimpur in Assam. The court remanded him to seven days in police custody. Mr. Apang has been booked under...

A parliamentary standing committee has recently asked the government to introduce the national food security Bill in the winter session of the Lok Sabha. A promise to implement a Bill of this kind was first mooted in President Pratibha Patil's inaugural speech last year when she mentioned the government's intention to provide each family below the poverty line (BPL) with 25 kg of foodgrains a month at Rs 3 per...