-IANS The railway ministry has asked the rural development ministry to bring its projects in far-off and rural areas under the rural job guarantee scheme. "A number of our projects in railways, including regular maintenance, require unskilled labour forces. Most of such works are connected with earthwork, construction and maintenance of embankments, cuttings, trenching, filling, developing water ways and clearing vegetational growth," Railway Minister Pawan Kumar Bansal said in a letter to...

-The Times of India In a scathing indictment of the Bihar government, a Press Council report has leveled serious charges against the state establishment including attempts to censor the media, misuse its "monopolistic status" for giving advertisements and arm-twisting newspapers to publish positive stories. Comparing the situation to Emergency, the three-member team that recently submitted its report to PCI chief Markandey Katju said that the Nitish Kumar government was forcing the...

-First Post New Delhi: With the three-year Right to Education (RTE) deadline for unrecognised private schools to register with the government expiring in less than two months, the Delhi government has directed the schools to either apply for recognition by Friday (February 15) or risk penal action. (Read government notice here) As per the RTE Act, a school that does not have a certificate of recognition will not be allowed to function....

-The Telegraph CPM general secretary Prakash Karat today backed Sitaram Yechury’s virtual endorsement of Afzal Guru’s execution but appeared to leave room for manoeuvre, saying that was his party’s stand “so far”. The hint of a possible review came as the party found itself isolated within the wider Left fraternity, with both the CPI and the CPI-ML (Liberation) taking a different stand. “Since many of us (politburo members) are out of Delhi, we...

-The Telegraph Even reformed capitalism cannot give equal opportunity There is a view that the real problem with capitalism is that there is no equality of opportunity under this system. Your entire life gets determined by which class you happen to get born into. If the effect of this ‘happenstance’ could somehow be eliminated, so that everyone enjoyed equality of opportunity, then even though income and wealth inequalities continued to remain...