-DNA While the Supreme Court of India's recent judgement to implement the Right to Education (RTE) Act has put private schools in a quandary, Gujarat government too is facing logistic, administrative and as social problems in execution of this Act. State education minister Ramanlal Vora on Wednesday spoke on these issues, elaborating that they are not only administrative but social too. A major hindrance in implementation of RTE Act is sharing of expenses...

We need a properly defined strategy to integrate poorer children into schools For millions of children, it is a struggle to get to school, to stay in school and to make sense of what is happening in the classroom. After visiting many homes in rural and urban India, I have realised that learning to read without decent instruction, without enough nutrition, without electricity and water, without a place to keep your...

Audits will look into the money released to the states in the last seven years, says Ghulam Nabi Azad The health ministry will conduct annual audits of the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) to detect irregularities in the utilization of funds. Health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad has written to the state governments seeking their cooperation on this. “We have decided to go for an audit of NRHM fund utilization across the states,”...

A gold medal fetches Rs 51,000 in Haryana and Rs 7,000 in Delhi. In Jharkhand and Bihar, it does not even fetch a return train ticket. Sandeep Oraon of Sangrampur, Ranchi, and Raj Kumar Sharma of Barharia, Siwan, struck gold for Delhi in the Para Athletics National Championship 2012 in Bangalore, which concluded on March 28, but said they would have felt more honoured to represent their home states had the...

Anand Patwardhan’s paean to Dalits, that took 14 years to compose, probes even as it praises, says Saroj Giri THERE IS an entrenched tendency to represent Dalits fighting for rights and reservations as just (another) competitive bloc vying for self-interest and power. It leads to a pernicious inversion: ‘Dalit rights’ dividing the nation along caste lines. Victim as perpetrator! Anand Patwardhan’s film Jai Bhim Comrade takes us beyond the grid of...