Ambedkar is prophet to a people he created soul and politics for The recent controversy over the cartoon of Babasaheb Ambedkar sitting on a snail and Pandit Nehru whipping it from behind, indicating that Ambedkar had made the process of making the Constitution slow, whereas Nehru was for hastening it, created a massive ruckus in Parliament, cutting across all political parties. The cartoon, drawn by P. Shankar Pillai in 1949,...

Each year boys max out seats at the Indian Institutes of Technology. But the count of girls who secured JEE ranks has doubled to 2,886 since the last edition of the exam. Yet, the tech Schools will on another front continue to be an unequal world: students from the IIT-Bombay zone (home to Kota) dominate the list of selected candidates. But the southern zone has bagged the credit for having...

Recent events in Parliament concerning a National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) textbook use of a Shankar cartoon of Babasaheb Ambedkar have correctly drawn outrage and public debate. General outrage has also been correctly expressed at the attack on Suhas Palshikar's office in Pune - apparently for his role as chief advisor of the offending textbook. In his statement, human resource development minister Kapil Sibal has chosen to limit...

Computers in primary School classrooms are not inherently a good thing I read with interest the report on the Central Advisory Board of Education on the use of technology in education, and broadly agree with their conclusion that computers should not enter the classroom until upper primary School level. The modern fascination with new technology makes me think of what Henry David Thoreau said: “Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys,...

A parliamentary panel has cited the practice in developed countries to reject a key provision in the land acquisition bill allowing the government to acquire plots for private companies. The committee said in the US, Japan and Canada, land is purchased by private enterprises, not acquired by the state. Why should India continue this “anomalous practice”, asked the parliamentary standing committee on rural development in its report on the Land Acquisition,...