The HRD ministry has taken the first step towards extending the Right to Education till the secondary level by making it part of the agenda of next month's meeting of state education ministers and the Central Advisory Board of Education. Sources say the idea of extending RTE is at the stage of infancy but the ministry is keen that the process should begin at right earnest so that it becomes...

The revised blueprint for land acquisition envisages government retaining its facilitator role Contentious Issues     * Protests are often against land acquisition per se, regardless of compensation     * Most protests are against private builders acquiring land, changing land use. New norms don’t tackle this.     * Poor government track record in R&R does not inspire much confidence; merged bills won’t work for rehabilitation after natural calamities, etc     * Can the government, which...

‘Law needed to monitor selection of party candidates' West Bengal ahead of other four States which contested Assembly elections Despite promises of women's participation, mere134 of 1,263 candidates women Thirty-five per cent of the MLAs elected in the recently concluded Assembly elections in West Bengal have criminal cases pending against them as against an average of 33 per cent of those in the four other States that underwent Assembly elections, according to the...

The steadily rising rate of economic growth in India has recently been around 8 percent per year (it is expected to be 9 percent this year), and there is much speculation about whether and when India may catch up with and surpass China’s over 10 percent growth rate. Despite the evident excitement that this subject seems to cause in India and abroad, it is surely rather silly to be obsessed...

It was a warm summer’s morning last week in teeming old Faridabad, a chaotic, industrial town where nearly half the people live in slums. Praveen Kumar was talking to students at a government girls’ senior secondary school. They complained about the broken fans, and they told him how there was just one sweeper to clean the stinky toilet. A lean, graying man with a receding hairline and neatly trimmed moustache, 51-year-old...