-Hindustan Times Lucknow: The admission process under Right to Education (RTE) in Uttar Pradesh will be conducted online from next academic session for easy scaling, improved transparency and better child tracking. Chief minister Akhilesh Yadav has directed the basic education department to introduce the online system, saying it will help in completing the admission process faster. Yadav believes that the online system will help draw more admission forms and more children from...

-Livemint.com The latest addition takes the total number of drought-affected talukas to 110, out of 177 talukas in the state Bengaluru: The Karnataka government on Wednesday declared 42 more talukas or administrative units as drought-affected. The latest addition takes the total number of drought-affected talukas to 110 (68 were announced drought-affected last week). There are 177 talukas in Karnataka across 30 districts. T.B. Jayachandra, law and parliamentary affairs minister of Karnataka, said that...

-The Economic Times NEW DELHI: Every day 4,800 applications are filed to access information from the government across India. The first decadal study conducted after Right to Information (RTI) Act implemented in October 2005 has revealed that over 1.75 crore applications have been filed with one-fourth being requests to the Centre. A study conducted by Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI), exclusively accessed by ET, reveals that 27.2% (47.66 lakh) of the total...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Supreme Court today pulled up the Maharashtra government for "not taking any interest" although hundreds of children had died of malnutrition in the state's drought-affected regions. "You don't bother when people die of malnutrition because you think it is a small figure in a country with a large population," a bench of Justices Madan B. Lokur and N.V. Ramana told a lawyer who appeared for the BJP-led...

-Down to Earth How companies are supplying unsafe and unverified nutrition supplements to children in Karnataka A curious case has emerged in Karnataka. Well-known companies, including Biocon, Jindal Steel and Scania, are supplying spirulina granules to undernourished and malnourished children enrolled in anganwadis (child daycare centres) under the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), in direct contravention of a 2004 Supreme Court order which said, “Contractors shall not be used for supply...