If this doesn’t raise a national stink, little else will. Around 3.5 crore toilets are missing in India, if official statistics are not meant to be flushed down the drain. The Union rural development ministry claims its Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC) has delivered more than 8.71 crore latrines to households across villages over the past decade. But household data from the population census shows that only around 5.16 crore households had latrines...

On March 15, 2011, when the Mamata Banerjee wave was at its zenith, thespians Saonli Mitra and Arpita Ghosh went to Bansberia in Hooghly to stage the anti-establishment play 'Poshu Khamar', based on George Orwell's Animal Farm. But they were turned back by local CPM MP Rupchand Pal, who feared that the play was meant to denigrate the then ruling Left Front. The public outrage against CPM's "social hegemony" was...

Court settles the class issue, but the real challenges of RTE have to be met The debate over the Right to Education is beginning to display characteristic symptoms of Indian debates. Elites are inventing specious arguments to condone the economic apartheid in the current system. But India’s self-appointed anti-elites are often even more elitist. They are more fixated on taking down elites a peg or two rather than intelligently fixing real...

Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress appears set to open another front against the Centre - this time over the June 30 deadline for changing the delivery of cable TV to digital. West Bengal government's urban development minister Firhad Hakim claimed here on Tuesday that the deadline was fixed "without consulting states".  He said the June 30 deadline would "create problems for cable operators" in the state and would mean that people would...

The Supreme Court's recent mandate that private unaided non-minority schools should reserve 25 per cent of seats for underprivileged children is being hailed as a landmark ruling. The spirit of the decision is indeed laudable as it reflects the egalitarian ethos of the Right to Education (RTE) Act. Thus, as private schools open their doors to children from marginalised sections of society, the government pats itself on the back for...