As dusk falls, the sound of children singing fills the air at the SOS Tibetan Children’s Village in Bylakuppe, five hours’ drive from Bangalore in southern India. Night descends on the tidy, stone-paved school campus carved out of the lush jungle. But darkness is dispelled when 20 solar-powered street lights on the campus begin to glow with a steady white light. Thirty dormitories set among groves of coconut palm trees are...

Union Human Resources Minister Kapil Sibal on Monday said the Centre will not budge on provisions of the Right to Education Act (RTE) including the neighbourhood school concept. “There is no question of relaxing any provision. Poor students need an opportunity to study in schools in their neighbourhood,” Sibal told reporters here. The Union Minister was in the City to deliver the Vithal N Chandavarkar Memorial Lecture on ‘Empowerment through Education’...

Interdependence and knowledge-sharing are keys to global food security, and the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture is the only legally binding treaty that promotes this, according to Xuan Li, Treaty Support Officer. Speaking to TheHindu on Monday, Ms. Xuan Li said 125 countries were signatories to the treaty that allowed access to the developments to individuals and corporations. The treaty provided access and benefit-sharing to 64 important...

Banks have designated red zones where the vast majority of Muslim clusters fall. This fact is confirmed by the rash of banking-related complaints received by the National Commission for Minorities. A little over a year ago, Ali Arshad, a resident of Okhla in Delhi, went to a well-known private sector bank to open a bank account. He thought his case would be fast-tracked because he had a banking background, he worked...

Acting with determination and firm action, it should be possible for India to step up its agricultural growth rate to 10 per cent. The 11th Five Year Plan seeks to achieve 4 per cent growth rate in agriculture by the end of the Plan period. The Planning Commission is working towards an overall 9 per cent to 10 per cent growth rate. But the target of 4 per cent growth rate is...