Today's Supreme Court judgment saying all private schools other than unaided minority schools must reserve one in four seats for poor children has provoked dismay in private schools. Principals of leading private schools in Delhi said the 25 per cent reservation would impose a severe financial burden on them. "The government should take care of education for the poor. Why cannot the government open new schools? Why are they pushing the 25...

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...

The time has come for optimal pricing of Water and power to prevent an unlimited pumping of groundWater and aid better coordination amongst competing demands for the scarce resource, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said here on Tuesday. Dr. Singh's observations come at a time when there is a debate on the pricing of Water and privatisation of services in the sector. The Ministry of Water Resources is working on a reforms-oriented...

-Express News Service Terming the existing institutional and legal structures of Water management in the country as “inadequate”, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Tuesday advocated for “urgent” reforms and batted for an “overarching national legal framework” for the governance of the sector.   Inaugurating India Water Week, which will be celebrated in April every year from now, Singh said: “One of the problems in achieving better management is that the current institutional and...

The key issue is not availability or resources but last mile delivery: how to reach foodgrains to people. In ancient Greece, the punishment given to Tantalus was to tie a cup around his neck and fill it with Water. Every time he bent to take a sip, the cup would drop further and he would never get a drop into his parched mouth. From this comes the word “tantalizing”. Something like...