Editorial

Why India remains most dangerous

The daylight kidnap and brutal gang-rape of a 19-year-old girl on her way to a coaching class in Rewari, Haryana has outraged the nation. That she had topped the CBSE class XII school-leaving exam earlier this year and had been felicitated by the President of India, didn’t galvanise the lethargic and leaden-footed Haryana state police […]

Editorial

Most cruel country for children

On july 25, three children, all below age ten, were found dead of starvation in a one-room shanty in the heart of Delhi. Autopsies revealed they hadn’t eaten for three days. A few days earlier the media was awash with reports of sexual abuse of orphaned and abandoned children in government shelters in Bihar and […]

Editorial

BJP should embrace Vajpayee legacy

The outpour of national sorrow on the demise of former prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee (1924-2018) on August 16 is reflective of a widespread subliminal awareness within the country that a statesman — rather than a mere politician — an individual who understood the real aspirations and priorities of the people, has passed away. With […]

Editorial

Time to weigh Kashmir excision option

Since the dawn of independence, the issue of the status of Kashmir has been a toxic thorn in the side of free India which has poisoned the body politic and stymied the national development effort. And even today shoot-outs, stone-pelting youth and violent deaths and destruction in the Kashmir valley are recurring headlines of daily […]

Editorial

No progress on safety for women

Mixed reactions ranging from shock, amazement, incredulity and scorn greeted the verdict of a Thomson Reuters Foundation report released on June 28 that ranks India as the worlds most dangerous country for women, more dangerous than Afghanistan, Syria and Saudi Arabia. According to the report, Indias 600 million women are more at risk of sexual […]

Editorial

Delhi public’s curious inertia

With the onset of winter, one of the great talking points of the nation is the high levels of air pollution in the cities of urban India, in particular Delhi, the national capital. A thick cover of smog — defined by Merriam-Webster’s dictionary as “a fog made heavier and darker by smoke and chemical fumes, […]

Editorial

Why demonetisation failed

On November 8, the country observed the first anniversary of the shock demonetisation (invalidation) of Rs.500 and Rs.1,000 currency notes of the Mahatma Gandhi series announced by prime minister Narendra Modi last year in an unscheduled nationally televised broadcast. Overnight, this announcement in effect invalidated 86 percent of all the cash (Rs.14.2 lakh crore) in […]

Editorial

Modi government’s forgotten promise

In 2014 when the BJP-led NDA government was swept to power in New Delhi, one of its major campaign promises which struck a chord with the electorate was ‘minimum government, maximum governance’. Right-thinking people interpreted this promise as reduction of red tape and intrusion by government into the lives of citizens and sharp focus on […]

Editorial

Critical importance of law & order

According to chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar, the two-day Haryana Global Investors Summit 2016, which concluded on March 8, was a great success. Over 2,300 delegates from 12 countries attended, and foreign and domestic memoranda of understanding valued at Rs.5.84 lakh crore were signed.

Such unbridled optimism and unique inability of politicians to make realistic assessments […]

Editorial

Time to switch to presidential system

The continuous disruption of the legislative business of Parliament in the winter session for 16 days consecutively by opposition parties led by the 130-year-old Congress, has cast a pall of gloom over the future of India’s democratic polity. It is pertinent to note that the winter session was a near deadlock without the conduct of […]

Editorial

Bihar’s choice between devil & deep sea

Undoubtedly the sweeping victory of the three-party mahagathbandhan Grand Alliance (JDU, RJD and Congress) in the Bihar legislative assembly election whose result was announced on November 8, has come as a relief to the long-suffering people of Bihar (pop.104 million). Its ancient glories notwithstanding, by common consensus Bihar is the most backward — per capita […]

Editorial

Excising the rot in Indian education

The vyapam scandal involving politicians, senior officials and businessmen of Madhya Pradesh (MP, pop.77 million) and covering admission of students into institutions of professional education and of graduates into the civil service, the teaching profession and police, has received widespread coverage in the media. But there’s insufficient awareness of the damage it has caused to […]

Editorial

Refusal to acknowledge ugly reality

The imposition of a nationwide ban on the screening of the BBC-commissioned documentary film India’s Daughter on March 4 by the Union government, supplemented by its futile efforts to persuade foreign governments to follow suit, is proof of a serious critical thinking skills deficit and reactionary mindset in the top echelons of the BJP/NDA coalition […]

Editorial

Balanced Appraisal of Jawaharlal Nehru

THE UNSEEMLY AND HIGHLY politicised war of words which has broken between the opposition Congress and the ruling BJP on the occasion of the 125th birth anniversary (November 14) of Jawaharlal Nehru, does little justice to independent India’s first prime minister. Whatever his other acts of commission and omission, it’s incontrovertible that Nehru dug deep […]

Editorial

Another budget mired in dead habit

EVEN AFTER CONCEDING that the Union Budget 2014-15 presented to Parliament and the nation on July 10 by new finance minister Arun Jaitley, is a truncated statement of accounts for the next seven months of the current financial year of the 60-days-old BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government, it’s a great disappointment. There’s hardly any […]

Editorial

Citizens need to vote proactively

BY THE TIME YOU READ this despairing editorial, polling in General Election 2014 will have commenced with the world’s largest electorate of 814 million citizens having begun the month-long process of voting away their future. For discerning observers of the political landscape despair is inevitable, because in mid-May a coalition government defined either by kleptocracy, […]

Editorial

AAP has misinterpreted mandate

The spectacular electoral debut of the Aam Aadmi Party in the Delhi state assembly elections two months ago, culminating in AAP forming the state government, had aroused great expectations of a new political sunrise covering the entire country. But since then, its oleaginous populism and maladroit initiatives in governance has raised ghosts of the post-Emergency […]

Editorial

Support new political alternatives

A Drowsy Numbness perhaps rooted in Oriental Fatalism seems to have afflicted youth of the nation. According to news reports based on census data and the electoral rolls of Delhi state (national capital region) which will have elected a new government by the time this issue of EducationWorld reaches newsstands, a mere 56 percent of […]

Editorial

Children First Party of India launched

On October 7, the first shot of what promises to be a protracted war for the hearts and minds of the Indian people was fired at a sparingly attended media conference at the Press Club, Bangalore. The Children First Party of India (CFPI), registered by the Election Commission of India […]

Editorial

Intelligentsia must support new political formations

The anointment of Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi as prime minister-designate should the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party win the looming general election of May 2014, is a denouement filled with dreadful implications which neither the reckless middle class which has rallied to his banner, nor the nation’s under-educated majority have adequately grasped. The belated misgivings […]

Editorial

Heavy price of linguistic majoritarianism

Too many of contemporary Indias politicians seem to believe the practice of democracy is about enforcing majority opinion when actually its about protecting minority rights and sensibilities. Such erroneous thinking is behind the rise of right-wing Hindu fundamentalism propagated by the powerful cultural organisation Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its political wing, the Bharatiya Janata […]

Editorial

Hardwired corruption blocking jobs creation

The grim spectre of mass unemployment is beginning to haunt the Indian economy. Belatedly, mainstream media and the political establishment have woken up to the reality that the prime purpose of encouraging investment — foreign and domestic — in the Indian economy, is to create jobs for the huge army of youth entering the jobs […]

Editorial

Opportunities for ushering in a new era

The election of a new government in Pakistan and the recent visit of newly elected Chinese prime minister Li Keqiang to India — the first country he has visited since his appointment — offers the scams-tainted Congress-led UPA-II government an opportunity to redeem itself in its last year in office, by resolving India’s long-pending territorial […]

Editorial

People need to seek out Political Alternatives

Although in the excitement generated by the mminent assembly elections in several states and the general election scheduled for next summer, it has gone off the headlines, government corruption is — or should be — a live issue at the hustings in the states and at the Centre. Two recent incidents in Maharashtra — India’s […]

Editorial

Demand accountability from government schools

In mid-March, several dailies in Bangalore headlined the poignant story of little Lakshmi Naikode (9), who fled her home and Kannada-medium government primary school last November to realise her dream of studying in an English-medium ‘convent’ school. Three days after she had unsuccessfully knocked on the doors of several private schools for admission, Lakhsmi was […]

Editorial

Children First Party of India debut

The republic is in deep crisis. on every norm of good governance and practice, the Congress-led UPA-II government which was returned to power in New Delhi in the summer of 2009 with high hopes and great expectations, has failed. The economy is in serious trouble with the current account deficit ballooning to a record 5.4 […]

Editorial

Implement overdue police reforms

A thin silver lining to the dark cloud of shame that hangs over the republic following the gangrape incident in Delhi on December 16, is that it has brought the full weight of public opinion to bear upon the long-pending issue of police reforms. It’s shocking but true that reports of several high-powered commissions and […]

Editorial

Gender crime wave requires cold analysis

The brutal gang rape of a 23-year-old paramedic student in a moving bus in the heart of Delhi on December 16, has not only triggered unprecedented student and middle class angst against the incident per se, it has also focussed a powerful searchlight on an important civilisational issue ignored for too long in post-independence India: […]

Editorial

Garden city’s garbage mountain shadow

The rising garbage mountains of the once green and pleasant city that is Bangalore aka Bengaluru (pop. 8 million), which are all set to collapse in a deluge of plague and pestilence upon this city — paradoxically the country’s premier science and technology hub — is a grim precursor of things to come for 21st […]

Editorial

Root cause of gender crime wave

The recent rash of sexual assaults and atrocities against women and teenage girl children in the state of Haryana (pop. 25.3 million) which has shocked the nation, is a severe indictment of the education system in this north Indian state. The outcome of decades of neglect of civic, gender and liberal arts education in K-12 […]

Editorial

Indefensible contempt of Parliament

The recently concluded 19-day monsoon session of Parliament which ended on September 7 without any orderly debate or passage of legislation, is a blot on India’s experiment in democracy. Although media pundits excoriated all political parties for the daily disruption of both houses of Parliament during the entire monsoon session of the country’s apex legislative […]

Editorial

Indian establishment’s Stockholm syndrome

Despite being proven beyond all reasonable doubt that India’s 18-million strong neta-babu (politician-bureaucrat) kleptocracy is engaged in open, continuous and uninterrupted loot of the public exchequer and actual and potential revenue of governments at the Centre and in the states, there’s a curious reluctance among media pundits and the nation’s intelligentsia to encourage the entry […]

Editorial

Little fear of law & order system

A common factor connects the several separate incidents of mob molestation of a teenage girl in Guwahati graphically captured by video footage, the brazen diktat issued by a khap panchayat (village council) forbidding women to venture out of their homes without a male escort or use mobile phones, and incidents involving celebratory gunfire in Uttar […]

Editorial

Ridiculous strong fundamentals mantra

An early June report of Standard & Poor’s — the well-known sovereign bonds and country risks rating agency which speculates that India may be the first country among Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC) nations to lose its S&P investment grade BBB- status labelling it a high-risk country for foreign investment — has shaken the […]

Editorial

Coming of age of the amoral socialist man

The commemoration of the 60th year of independent India’s Parliament by all members of both houses of the legislature cutting across party lines on May 13, should have been a gala occasion nationwide. Instead, the festivities were muted and confined to Parliament while the rest of the country introspected upon the reality that contemporary India is a […]

Editorial

End over-subsidisation of higher education

The enactment of the Right to Free and Compulsory (RTE) Education Act, 2009 and the Supreme Court’s substantial validation of its provisions by its judgement delivered on April 12, has belatedly focused national attention upon vitally important primary and upper primary education — the foundation block of national development worldwide. Despite newly independent India having adopted Soviet-style […]

Editorial

Change budget presentation style and format

The citizenry of India is too patient and undemanding of its leaders. True, when they commit egregious crimes and brazen acts of impropriety, the public is not averse to voting them out of office. Yet everyday acts of omission and commission and particularly dereliction of the duty of accountability for revenue mobilised through taxation, and […]

Editorial

Corruption a live issue for electorate

The utter rout of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) and the Dravida Munnetra Kazagham (DMK) in the recently concluded legislative assembly elections in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu respectively, is clear proof that contrary to popular punditry, abatement, if not elimination, of corruption in government is a live and important issue in Indian politics. […]

Editorial

Leave deemed universities well alone

Media reports emanating from New Delhi, suggesting that a committee of the University
Grants Commission (UGC) is finalising the provisions of a Bill to regulate the admissions and fees of privately promoted deemed universities, indicate that the licence-permit-quota culture is alive and well in the Union human resource development ministry and UGC. A UGC (Admission […]

Editorial

Democracy lessons from America

The landmark election of senator Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States of America on November 4, highlights the stark differences in the practice and precepts of democratic governance between the US and India, the most vibrant and most populous democracies respectively of the contemporary world. The overwhelming popular mandate in favour […]