-The Telegraph New Delhi: Schoolchildren from national boards have outperformed those from the state boards in the first-ever standardised countrywide test of Class X pupils, carried out as part of a sample survey by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT). Students from the Council for the Indian School Certificate Examinations, which conducts the ICSE exam, and the Central Board of Secondary Education have come out tops while Madhya Pradesh,...

-The Hindu The grandiose spectacle that the Art of Living Foundation has organised on a thousand-acre site on the floodplain of a river in Delhi to demonstrate ‘humanitarianism’ and the oneness of cultures will go down as a spectacular example of thoughtless environmental destruction. The Central and Delhi governments have, in a display of extraordinary non-application of mind, allowed a private entity to take over part of the Yamuna floodplain, an...

-Frontline Higher education has been growing from strength to strength in recent years, with State public and private universities dominating the scene. CENTRAL universities are suddenly in the eye of a storm in the country. First it was the University of Hyderabad, where the suicide of Dalit research scholar Rohith Vemula led to nationwide student protests and drew universal condemnation of the authorities, and now the nation is gripped by the...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Budget cuts in several schemes for minority, Dalit and tribal students have prompted academics and activists to question the government's commitment to the education of marginalised communities. A section of the budget papers presented on Monday, titled "Expenditure Budget, Statement 22", shows a fall in allocations to many schemes compared with last year's budget. For example, allocations for pre-matric scholarships for minorities and Dalits have fallen by over 10...

In the age of social media, various sections of the Indian polity and civil society have reacted publicly in diverse voices, following the presentation of the Union Budget 2016-17 by Finance Minister Shri Arun Jaitley. An assessment of the Union Budget 2016-17 has been done in the following paragraphs by the Inclusive Media for Change team, based on a number of media reports, Government documents (including the Budget documents), and reports...