-The Hindu   In his Independence Day address, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh made two important announcements, both relating to education. One affirmed the government's intention to improve the quality of education at various levels and appoint an Education Commission to go into the issues. The other outlined a plan to universalise secondary education as a follow-up to the enactment of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act (RTE), 2009...

-The Business Standard   Hurling charges against political opponents is par for the course in democratic politics. No one can object too much to political name calling, such as, “so and so is a fascist” or “so and so is communal”, and such like. Politicians routinely hurl such invective at each other. Less excusable is innuendo, but there is a lot of that too in politics around the world. However, what technology...

-The Hindu   Members of the Parliamentary Committee on Law and Justice who had a “very frank, intense and productive” discussion with social activist Anna Hazare on the Lokpal Bill are amazed that he after, giving them an impression of being “satisfied” with the interaction, said “something else” to the media. The meeting ended with the Committee asking Team Anna to send its Jan Lokpal Bill to it for further discussion so that...

-IANS   South Asians for Human Rights (SAHR) has condemned the arrest of social activist Anna Hazare and others before they launched their agitation for an effective Lokpal bill as "ultra vires" of the Indian constitution. SAHR chairperson Hina Jilani of Pakistan said in a statement that in a democracy all citizens have a right to protest peacefully and the government must uphold the citizens' fundamental right of speech and expression. "This act of...

Its facets include concentration of media ownership and the transformation of news into a commodity. THE last two decades have witnessed a dramatic transformation of India's ‘mediascape' – a term first used by Arjun Appadurai, an academic of Indian origin based in the United States, to describe how visual imagery impacts the world and to describe and situate the role of the mass media in global cultural flows. While there...