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 Indian Express   By the ferocity of her reaction to a weak cartoon, Mamata Banerjee proves her detractors right Mamata Banerjee has made political satire redundant. Her exaggerated, distorted reaction to a cartoon about herself makes her look like a tinpot tyrant. Was the cartoon defamatory? Only to the extent that any political cartoon is — it referenced Satyajit Ray’s detective classic Sonar Kella, and showed Mamata Banerjee and Mukul Roy making...

Chief Justice of India (CJI) S H Kapadia on Thursday said a very good law like Right to Information (RTI) was being misused to ask irrelevant and intrusive questions seriously impeding the working of the Judges and the Supreme Court.  When a bench of CJI and Justices D K Jain, S S Nijjar, R P Desai and J S Khehar were deliberating on reporting guidelines of sub-judice matters, Justice Kapadia said,...

Statistics can abet illusions, unless properly understood and used. The debates on poverty line and budget deficits reflect a lack of understanding of the meaning and purpose of these measures. India has been recently witness to furious debates on measures of poverty and budget deficits. Any measure can be used only for the purpose it is designed for. The debates in the present cases were furious, because preconceptions and emotions were...

‘Unless media freedom to report court proceedings is protected, the right to know will be impaired”   Freedom of the press cannot be compromised with any other fundamental right enshrined in the Constitution, senior counsel Anil Divan argued in the Supreme Court on Wednesday. Continuing his submissions before a five-judge Constitution Bench headed by Chief Justice of India S.H. Kapadia, counsel said the right conferred under Article 19 (1) (a) though not absolute...