The UT Administration might be congratulating itself over its achievement of having implemented the Right to Education Act (RTE) in the city but the actual situation in schools leaves much to be desired. The lack of basic infrastructure, including seating arrangements and classrooms, is defeating the basic purpose of the Act. The Government High School, Mauli Jagran, is one such school in the city that is bursting at its seam...

The Indian media have grown rapidly in scale, reach, influence, and revenues. But all stakeholders must realise that the ethical underpinning of professional journalism in the country has weakened and that the corrosion of public life in our country has impacted journalism. So what needs to be done? We have been witness in recent years to rapid, and unprecedented, changes in our society, economy, and polity. These have also transformed the...

-Express News Service   Affirming the trend of migration of people from villages to big cities and towns, the provisional figures of Census 2011 reveal that for the first time, India has added more people in urban centres than in rural areas over a decade. Between 2001 and 2011, the number of people living in urban areas increased from 286 million to 377 million, a rise of 91 million. In comparison, the...

Fears on the rampant use of pre-natal sex determination technology in rural areas have been confirmed with census data indicating that child sex ratio (CSR) fell far more sharply in villages than in urban areas in the last decade. According to provision data on population, though the urban CSR is far worse than that in rural areas, the fall in CSR in rural areas is around four times than that in...

-The Telegraph   The Supreme Court has criticised those who raise “the bogey of judicial activism or overreach” every time the courts try to enforce welfare laws. A two-judge bench said the courts do not exceed their jurisdiction by hearing public interest litigations filed by NGOs and social activists on behalf of the poor and illiterate. Rather, by doing so, the courts fulfil a mandate laid down in the Constitution’s chapter on...