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,...

Statistics can abet illusions, unless properly understood and used. The debates on poverty line and budget deficits reflect a lack of understanding of the meaning and purpose of these measures. India has been recently witness to furious debates on measures of poverty and budget deficits. Any measure can be used only for the purpose it is designed for. The debates in the present cases were furious, because preconceptions and emotions were...

-PTI A professor of chemistry of the Jadavpur University was arrested on Friday along with his neighbour for allegedly posting a cartoon on a popular social networking site involving chief minister Mamata Banerjee, railway minister Mukul Roy and former railway minister Dinesh Trivedi. DCP (south suburban division) Sujay Chanda said that professor Ambikesh Mohapatra was arrested along with a neighbour residing in east Jadavpur for spreading derogatory messages against "respectable persons". They would...

-CNN-IBN   The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the Constitutional validity of the Right to education Act, saying that there will be 25 per cent reservation in government, local authority schools and private schools for children from the economically weaker sections of the society.   A bench comprising Chief Justice SH Kapadia and justices KS Radhakrishnan and Swantanter Kumar, which had reserved its verdict on August 3, 2011, upheld the validity of provisions of...

The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the various provisions of the Right to education Act, 2009. The apex court ruled that the RTE Act would apply to all categories of public and private schools except unaided minority schools. The SC judgement makes it clear that all schools will have to keep aside 25% of seats for poor children. The SC said the judgement would come into effect from today. The SC said the RTE...