The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights has asked the schools to scrap the entrance tests for admissions The government’s special schools have discovered that their selection process is in direct violation of the Right to Education (RTE) Act, which stipulates that entrance tests are illegal up to class VIII. The Jawahar Navodaya Vidyalayas (JNVs), a special group of 594 schools across India, have conducted two rounds of “selection tests” to...

Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto turned classical capitalism on its head with his trickle-up theory: that if you create wealth at the bottom of the pyramid, it will find its way up. de Soto, president of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy, speaks to The Indian Express Editor-in-Chief Shekhar Gupta on NDTV’s Walk the Talk on the need for the poor to be able to participate in the global economy...

Differences in Cabinet on tackling the issue United on the need to deal with the pernicious practice of “honour killings,” but facing division in the Cabinet on how to tackle the issue, the Centre on Wednesday decided to consult the States and set up a Group of Ministers (GoM) to suggest changes in the law to deal with the matter. Information and Broadcasting Minister Ambika Soni said after a Cabinet meeting: “We...

The Planning Commission today decided in favour of pumping nearly Rs 14,000 crore into social and physical infrastructure building in some 35 Maoist-hit districts. The plan, formulated at the request of finance minister Pranab Mukherjee, will focus on the National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme, rural roads, health, rural electricity, universal elementary education, child nutrition and health and new residential schools called ashram schools. Later this month, the action plan will be placed...

A leading Dutch environment agency reported on Monday that the seminal 2007 UN scientific report on climate change is too generalized and has even more errors than discovered so far -- including one contributed by the agency itself. But the review by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency claimed the errors had no effect on the fundamental conclusion by UN panel of scientists: that global warming caused by humans already is...