The city is estimated to have upwards of 88,000 people living on the streets Each evening this winter, as MPs have debated India's political future, more than 100 people have been gathering at a municipal park behind the Bangla Sahib gurdwara. The area has dozens of groups of protesters who arrive in the city each time Parliament is in session, to make their voices heard. The people in the park, though, aren't...

The wait to know whether your child's School admission is confirmed just got longer. Many city Schools have put admission on hold, thanks to the confusion prevailing over some provisions of the Right to Education (RTE) Act. The landmark law, which guarantees every child education, has also made it mandatory for all Schools, including private institutions, to set apart 25% of their seats for the under-privileged. Though it was passed in...

It will provide credit risk guarantee to banks on the loans Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Tuesday announced that the Centre was considering setting up a credit risk guarantee fund with a corpus of Rs. 1,000 crore, to start with, to encourage banks to lend to the poor for housing. Emphasising that developing housing for the poor was critical for sustainable urban development, he said: “To encourage banks to lend in significant...

-The Indian Express   The All India Muslim Personal Law Board and Muslim clerics have sent several delegations to the Human Resource Development ministry and even threatened to start an agitation if madrasas are not kept out of the Right to Education Act’s provisions. That apart, a delegation of Congress leaders, led by Digvijaya Singh, today urged Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to exempt minority education from the ambit of the Right to...

Tamil Nadu’s free laptop distribution scheme, involving what is said to be the largest government order for computing equipment in India, hangs in the balance as all but one vendor, hit by the hard disk shortage created by recent floods in Thailand, have refused to sign on to the state administration’s delivery schedule. “Out of six vendors only one has signed an agreement and we have given a purchase order,” an...