Reservation will change their character, says Supreme Court The Supreme Court on Thursday held that the Right to Education Act would not apply to unaided minority Schools. The majority judgment by Chief Justice S.H. Kapadia and Justice Swatanter Kumar said: “Reservation of 25 per cent in such unaided minority Schools will result in changing the character of the Schools if the right to establish and administer such Schools flows from the right...

-The Hindu Now that the Supreme Court has upheld the constitutional validity of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009, the Centre and the States must do their utmost to provide eight years of good quality Schooling to all children. The unsuccessful challenge to the Act, which went into effect on April 1, 2010, came from unaided private School managements who are required to set apart 25...

-The Indian Express SC rightly upholds equity in private Schools — now govt Schools should pull their socks up The Supreme Court has upheld the Right to Education Act and its 25 per cent quota for children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds in all Schools — public, private and in-between (except minority unaided institutions). It dismissed the petition of certain private Schools, which argued that the directive to admit these children was unconstitutional,...

-Live Mint   No other social sector programme has been criticized for being successful as has the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS). So much so that it is not the inefficiency of the MGNREGS that is a problem, but its success that is seen as the reason for several problems facing the country. Even though it is still a small programme with annual spending of less than Rs.35,000 crore,...

I have never been to Brazil's "beautiful horizon", Belo Horizonte, the country's third-largest metropolitan area and an information and bio-technology hub, but I have followed the city's progress against what was once its enduring shame: hunger. In 1993, when 11% of its 2.5 million people lived in absolute poverty and a fifth of Belo's children went hungry, a newly-elected government declared that food was a fundamental right of every citizen,...