-DNA The high court, on Thursday, issued notices to the special officer and undersecretary to the education department over the income ceiling for free seats in schools for poor students under Right to Education Act (RTE). Petitioner K Nagesh and two others had challenged the RTE rule of fixing the maximum income ceiling at `30,000 per month for getting free seats for general category students ofeconomically weaker sections. In their petition, the three...

-The Hindu Public Interest Litigation is a good thing when it is used to enforce the rights of the disadvantaged. But it has now been diluted to interfere with the power of the government to take decisions on a range of policy matters Judicial activism is not an easy concept to define. It means different things to different persons. Critics denounce judicial decisions as activist when they do not agree with them....

-Outlook Kejriwal’s original experiment in Sundar Nagri lies in tatters It was the summer of 2002. An IRS officer on study leave from the Income Tax department would travel daily to the slums of Sundar Nagri, in the north-east district of Delhi, close to the Uttar Pradesh border. Working with friends, he aimed to make the locality a powerful example of people’s empowerment. He was then an unknown; now, everyone knows...

-The Telegraph The Supreme Court has disbanded its 17-year-old green sentinel. The court has wound up its green bench that sat every Friday since 1995 to deal with matters of forests and wildlife and had recently banned iron ore mining in Bellary, Karnataka, one among a host of far-reaching orders related to the environment. No reasons were given for disbanding the bench, a move legal experts said was inexplicable. The bench has, however, not...

-The Hindu Students turn up for classes but find errant school closed The Oxford English School on Nandini Layout, where the tuft of hair of some children admitted under the Right to Education quota for the disadvantaged children were snipped to distinguish them from the rest, remained closed on Thursday, even as protests were staged in front of it. In the morning, children who came to the school were turned away by the...