-Business Standard While allocations to several social sector schemes have been increased, concerns about the direction of the funds being ploughed remain The health and education sectors have trudged along the last two years awaiting direction that would be set through new policies the National Democratic Alliance government promised. In the absence of these guiding documents, most observers have been left to read the intermittent policy decisions like tea-leaves to guess the...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Centre has dropped two Supreme Court-appointed food experts from its reconstituted midday-meal monitoring panel and included a member from an RSS-linked organisation with no expertise on such issues. N.C. Saxena and Biraj Patnaik, the two food security commissioners on the first panel set up by former HRD minister M. Pallam Raju, have been dropped by an empowered committee headed by minister Smriti Irani. The top court had...

-The Indian Express That’s the message of the JNU arrest, sent by the government to the young. It is ill-judged, threatens their basic rights Police action at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi on Friday, including the arrest of the JNU students’ union president on charges of sedition, over a protest, was completely uncalled for. The protest in question was part of an event held on campus to commemorate the hanging of...

-The Indian Express Education outcomes may have declined under the RTE, but scrapping the no-detention policy is not the answer. In the five years since the potentially transformative Right to Education Act (RTE) was implemented, several studies have documented the decline and stagnation of learning levels in school. The Annual Status of Education Reports have painted a dismal picture. Most children emerge from primary school lacking even rudimentary arithmetic and reading...

-Scroll.in The decision to waive fees could provide a model for increasing enrolment of persons with disabilities in other educational institutions too. On October 7, Union human resource development minister Smriti Irani announced that the Indian Institute of Technology Council had waived the fees for students with disabilities admitted to IITs. This followed a decision to extend a complete waiver on hostel fees to students in the "persons with disability" category at...