The uninformed informer

All 30 students of Super 30, Bihar’s free coaching centre for poor students here, cracked the IIT-JEE this year. “All the 30 students have cleared the IIT-JEE,” Anand Kumar, the institute’s founder-director said at a press conference on Wednesday. “It is a matter of great pleasure as we have achieved it again," he said, adding that since the inception of the coaching centre in 2002, a total of 212 students have cleared the IIT-JEE examination, which is considered as one of the toughest examinations in the world. Mr. Kumar said the students hail from very poor families and commit themselves to a year of 16-hour study each day after passing a competitive test to get into the coaching centre. “Now we will try to arrange loans for the education of the poor students who qualified for IITs,” he said. Mr. Kumar, who himself missed a chance to study at the Cambridge due to lack of money, gives full scholarships including room and travel to the students. When contact...

Reproduced here below a brilliant article written by P.Sainath in The Hindu on 17 April 2010 Freebies for the IPL — at a time of savage food subsidy cuts for the poor — benefit four men who make the Forbes Billionaire List of 2010 and a few other, mere multi-millionaires. And so the IPL fracas is now heading for its own Champions League. Union Cabinet Ministers, Union Ministers of State, Chief Ministers (and who knows a Governor or two might pop up yet) are being named as people trying to influence the bidding process. Both houses of Parliament are in uproar. The taxmen have launched a “survey.” Many in the media and politics are happy to reduce it all to issues of propriety or personality. For, the BCCI-IPL is one platform where the Congress and the BJP cohabit, normally with ease. Big money is, after all, a secular, bi-partisan space. (Or tri-partisan: let's not deny the central contribution of the NCP to this phenomenon.) It's also interesting that the media, though n...

Ajmal Kasab is 30th on the list. And his best well wishers now are the 29 people ahead of him in line, who will give Kasab a long-life. The last man hanged in India was somewhere around 1995. Im sure even the other 29 on the list would not like to be hung by the same noose as Kasab.The judge has already declared that he has no humanitarian ground left to consider any leniency. There is substantial,circumstancial and all other types of evidence available against Ajmal Kasab. Does he even deserve the right to appeal or file a mercy petition? Can we afford to keep him in our prisons and risk making him a commodity for ransom. Keeping him alive will only make him the poster boy of other terror groups. Either execute him mercilessly or send him back to this mother and drive home the message that there is no glory in terror, and that there is no holy war.The victim's families will never achieve any closure, no matter what Kasab's fate is, but let them not get the feeling that so ...

The Hindu : Opinion / Lead : ISI & the buried truths about Mumbai