Competing for praise and popularity is as common between Ministries as are turf wars. When officers from different Ministries get the rare opportunity to meet and discuss matters of shared concern, they behave like alert soldiers who are expected to fight for every inch of territory. I had an exposure to this phenomenon while working for a Planning Commission sub-committee on vocational education for skill development. Vocational and technical training...

Traditional Sanskrit schools, known as ved pathshalas, will be exempt from the Right to Education Act and their students will be allowed to later join mainstream schooling, human resource development minister Kapil Sibal said on Tuesday. The assurance came after some of Hinduism's most revered institutions – including the Kanchi Matha, the Ahobila Matha, the Andayan Ashrama and the Arya Samaj – demanded exemption for the pathshalas, as was reported by...

BANGALORE: The Management Association of ICSE Schools on Thursday decided to wait and discuss the Right To Education Act Bill with the state government, before approaching court on its implementation. After a meeting with all ICSE schools on Thursday, Mohan Manghnani, president, Association of ICSE Schools in Karnataka, told TOI that they had decided to approach the Supreme Court only as the last resort. "The association will wait for the state...

The Right to Education Act (RTE) mandates the setting up of School Management Committees (SMC) by all private unaided schools for managing school affairs, including fixing fees, in six months’ time but so far no school has done anything about it. RTE implementation would complete the stipulated six-month period on September 1 but many schools are not even aware of the concept under which 75 per cent of the members of...

Mayavati had better do something quick about the state of schools in Uttar Pradesh if she wants children to spell her name right. An NGO assessing the District Primary Education Programme and Sarva Siksha Abhiyan, a national programme for universalisation of elementary education, asked 16 students of Classes III and IV of a government school in Joar village near Lucknow to write the name of their chief minister in Hindi. Mavit and...