All schools, barring unaided minority institutions, will have to set aside 25 per cent of their seats for disadvantaged sections in the neighbourhood, the Supreme Court ruled today. The top court settled the question by upholding the relevant clause in the right to education law, saying that “advancement of education is a recognised head of charity” and rejecting a slew of petitions filed by several unaided schools. Since the act deals with...

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,...

‘Unless media freedom to report court proceedings is protected, the right to know will be impaired”   Freedom of the press cannot be compromised with any other fundamental right enshrined in the Constitution, senior counsel Anil Divan argued in the Supreme Court on Wednesday. Continuing his submissions before a five-judge Constitution Bench headed by Chief Justice of India S.H. Kapadia, counsel said the right conferred under Article 19 (1) (a) though not absolute...

-CNN-IBN Upset over various incidents ranging from the Park Street rape case to attack on human Rights organisations, intellectuals of Kolkata, including a Trinamool Congress MP, on Thursday hit the streets in protest against the 11-month-old Trinamool regime in the state. "There are lots of differences between the old Mamata Banerjee and Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee. The people of this state have thrown away those who have tried to throttle the voice...

An unnecessary controversy has been started by the release of the poverty estimates of 2009-10 by the planning commission. The controversy, which was entirely avoidable, was allowed to go on because of the poor handling of the issue by the planning commission. It is unfortunate that the planning commission was less than willing to own the Tendulkar committee report which was submitted in December 2009 and accepted by the commission...