Allaying fears of minority groups about the Right to Education Act, HRD minister Kapil Sibal on Thursday said the government has no intention to interfere with minority rights which are guaranteed under the Article 30 of the Constitution. Speaking at a meeting on RTE organised by Jamiat-Ulama-e-Hind, Sibal said his ministry will issue regulations to deal with minority fears on RTE and if need, the RTE Act will even be...

The government on Thursday said it did not propose any amendments to the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act that would dilute the Act's provisions. “There are some practical difficulties in the implementation of the Act that need to be addressed,” a senior official of the Human Resource Development Ministry said. “We are working out a reasonable way to address these issues to take the social agenda forward without...

In what could end up diluting the Right to Education Act, the government is considering a crucial amendment whereby schools will not be required to admit all applicants and can screen and select most of the students who will gain entry. The "admission-as-an entitlement" provision will be limited to only the poor children in the neighbourhood and seats for them will be pegged at 25%. Put simply, schools will continue...

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...

One looks forward to the Finance Minister's budget speech with a hope that it spells some new major initiatives and schemes for development, and that it might promise any major allocation of resources to any sector, besides fresh tax proposals. In the case of education sector, one might feel disappointed at the proposals made in the Union budget for 2010-11 on both counts. No new initiatives are proposed; no major...