-The Times of India     The three-year compliance period for the Right to Education (RTE) Act is just over. What has the Act accomplished? Sadly, not very much that is positive. A key provision in the law abolishes board examinations and grants automatic promotion to each child to the next grade at the end of the academic year. It also requires the award of a diploma to all at the end of eight...

-Bloomberg The corpse of Indian farmer Bengali Singh burned to ash atop a blazing funeral pyre on the banks of the river Ganges in 2006. Five years later, the dead man was recorded as being paid by India's $33 billion rural jobs program to dig an irrigation canal in Jharkhand state. Officials in his village and the surrounding region used at least 500 identities, including those of Singh, a disabled child of...

-Civil Society Online Accreditation is the act of granting credit or recognition. It is to be preceded with a process where facts, figures and professional ethics are scrutinized so that the desired certification of competency, authority or credibility is presented. Only the best suited with the requisite track record are to find themselves in the approved list. In India, the much talked about and well critiqued initiative wherein consultants undertaking the responsibility...

-The Hindu Considering the knowledge of English as a mark of social advancement and that of the vernacular as backwardness disenfranchises significant sections of society In a village in Ghazipur district that borders Varanasi, there is a young man who teaches English and "personality development" to the sons and daughters of local shopkeepers, farmers and truck drivers. The classes are held from 6 to 8 in the morning and again in the...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: HRD ministry has categorically ruled out extension of three-year deadline to states who failed to create the necessary infrastructure to implement the Right to Education (RTE) Act, whose deadline expired on March 31. Acceding to the extension request would have meant amending the RTE Act. But at the end of 61st meeting of the Central Advisory Board on Education (CABE) HRD minister M M Pallam Raju...