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’...

As dusk falls, the sound of children singing fills the air at the SOS Tibetan Children’s Village in Bylakuppe, five hours’ drive from Bangalore in southern India. Night descends on the tidy, stone-paved school campus carved out of the lush jungle. But darkness is dispelled when 20 solar-powered street lights on the campus begin to glow with a steady white light. Thirty dormitories set among groves of coconut palm trees are...

Even though the West Bengal government is yet to confirm that suicides by farmers in the Ausgram block of Bardhaman district are drought-related, following the third incident on Wednesday, district authorities admitted on Thursday that the farmers were “under a stress of debt burden.” “It is not possible to be sure whether the suicides are drought-related or not, but it is clear that the economic condition of the farmers was not...

Demanding adequate compensation to the family of a debt-ridden farmer who allegedly committed suicide, irate farmers in Orissa''s Kendrapara district today detained a senior government officer for three hours, police said. The incident took place at Andara village when Pattamundai tehsildar Pabitra Mohan Pradhan went there to investigate the alleged debt-induced suicidal death, they said. Locals squatted on the road leading to the village and put the tehsildar under detention for nearly...

A 32-year-old sharecropper hanged himself in Ausgram's Purbachati village on Wednesday morning, the third suicide in the drought-ridden region in less than two weeks. The news spread like wildfire through the scorched fields when, just 5km away, Trinamool Congress leaders Partha Chatterjee and Sisir Adhikary were consoling the families of the earlier two victims, Jitu Bagdi and Yunus Seikh. Gosai Patra quietly walked out of home at dawn and hanged...