A Group of Ministers headed by Finance Minister Pranab Mukhejree is likely to meet on Monday to vet London-listed mining group Vedanta Resources' $ 9.6 billion acquisition of Cairn India.
Philip G Altbach, Monan University Professor and director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College in an interview with Suman Guha Mozumder says that foreign universities is not the solution to India's education problems.
The new tablet would have a better 3200m AH battery with a three hour battery backup, a 700 MHz Cortex A8 processor and a capacitive touch screen which would get over the earlier issues observed in the tablets, Sibal had said earlier.
Making a strong case for US institutions of higher education to partner with those in India, the Minister for Human Resource Development said it is time that the US institutes of higher learning realise that the 'way to move forward in education is to come to India, to collaborate and set up institutions and reach out to people.'
Tablet PC, named Aakash, will cost the government Rs 2,276.
Gandhian Anna Hazare on Friday announced a 'jail bharo' movement across the country on April 13 after the government rejected his demands of chairmanship of the joint drafting committee being given to a civil society member and for a formal notification.
The central government on Thursday opened a channel of communication with anti-corruption protestors led by Anna Hazare with Union Minister Kapil Sibal meeting activists Swami Agnivesh and Arvind Kejriwal to find a way out the demand for a joint committee on drafting Lokpal Bill.
The minister cited the example of Income Tax refunds, where sometimes officials demand money for giving a refund.
Stressing on professionalism, hardwork and ethics as the key to success, Union Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal said the popular perception in some quarters that being cunning and manipulative pays in corporate world was wrong.
After Union Home Minister P Chidambaram it now appears to be the turn of Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal, who is under attack by Congressmen both within and outside the government.
Sibal said the government will have enough radio waves for all operators after it is released from the defence services as well as the cancellation of 122 2G new licences by the Supreme Court in the 2G spectrum allocation case.
Kapil Sibal, telecom minister, said many companies borrowed heavily to pay for 3G licences late last year. These companies were now facing difficulty in raising resources for the business, upsetting the calculations they had made while bidding aggressively for the licences, he said.
Refusing to be labeled as an enemy of the social media, Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal has called for the Internet to be governed by regulations similar to the print and the electronic media.
Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal on Tuesday warned that the growth of the telecom industry would be hurt if companies did not align their profit-making motives with the national interest and such a scenario could lead to over-regulation of the sector.
HRD Minister Kapil Sibal on Tuesday apologised to chess wizard Vishwanathan Anand over the controversy on conferring an honorary doctorate to him and made it clear that his nationality was never questioned by the ministry.
Congress spokesperson Jayanthi Natarajan was named a member of the Joint Parliamentary Committee into the 2G spectrum scam after her colleague Abhishek Singhvi recused himself taking the plea that he had appeared for cellular operators in the court as a senior advocate.
According to reports, CAG has sought details from the department of telecommunication on the total available spectrum in the country and how much has been allocated to private telecom operators from 2000 onward and at what value.
Swami Agnivesh, a close associate of Anna Hazare, was the target of the core Anna team which attacked him over a controversial video posted on Youtube where he is purportedly telling a person alleged to be a Union minister that government act tough with the fasting Gandhian.
A bench of justices P Sathasivam and B S Chauhan, however, declined to issue notice to Union Home Minister P Chidambaram and HRD Minister Kapil Sibal for the incident.
With the government moving a resolution in the Lok Sabha to set up a Joint Parliamentary Committee on the 2G spectrum issue, the battle lines between the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance and the Bharatiya Janata Party have become more tightly drawn with the Congress preparing its ammunition to target the BJP during its National Democratic Alliance government, in a bid to expose the actions of their telecom ministers.
Jailed former Telecom Minister A Raja on Wednesday told a Delhi court that he would get Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, the then finance minister P Chidambaram and the current Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal summoned as witnesses to prove that the government did not incur any loss in the 2G allocation.
These universities are a part of the ministry's 'brain gain' policy to attract talent from all over the world. Human Resources Development Minister Kapil Sibal had last August announced that 14 Innovation Universities will be set up in the country under the 11th Five-year Plan (2007-12).
The one-member Shivraj Patil committee report, which was made public in its entirety on Thursday, has put in the dock communications ministers and key bureaucrats in the department of telecom since 2001.
After Congress General Secretary Digvijay Singh, another Congress leader has incurred social activist Anna Hazare's wrath. This time Hazare has slammed Human Resource Minister Kapil Sibal for sabotaging the Lokpal bill by not bringing a good bill before the Parliament.
Slamming Team Anna for burning copies of the Lokpal Bill, government on Thursday said actions of the civil society members was an insult to Parliament and posed a danger to democracy.
The one-man panel that went into the procedures for giving 2G licences between 2001 and 2009 on Monday submitted its report and is understood to have held some officials responsible for improper spectrum allotment.
Canadian firm Research in Motion is installing and testing a new service, to be made available before January 31, which will automatically render lawfully intercepted BlackBerry messenger messages in a format readable by Indian agencies.
The Supreme Court on Friday severely criticised Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal for making statements undermining the Comptroller and Auditor General of India's report on the 2G spectrum scam and asked him to behave with some sense of responsibility.
Questioning Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's honesty, the Anna Hazare team has raised its pitch on the Lokpal Bill demanding that its version be placed before Parliament, saying that the "weak" government draft was a "joke" played on the nation.
Senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader and Parliament's Public Accounts Committee Chairman Murli Manohar Joshi hit out at Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal for questioning the Comptroller and Auditor General report on the 2G Spectrum scam. He said that Sibal's comments showed both the PAC and the CAG in poor light and said that the telecom minister's conduct was unbecoming.
Whether Sibal has effectively defended Raja or not as a counsel is unclear, but his target seems to be the prime minister, feels M R Venkatesh.
In an interview with CNN-IBN, Bharatiya Janata Party president Nitin Gadkari has slammed Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal for questioning the 2G report and rubbished the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh's alleged links with terror. Here are some excerpts from the interview:
There is nothing sinister or diabolic about Union minister Kapil Sibal's latest argument regarding the findings of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) of India pertaining to the loss to the exchequer from 2G telecom licences in 2007.
Comptroller and Auditor General Vinod Rai has asked Public Accounts Committee Chairman Murli Manohar Joshi for permission to react to Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal\\'s open attack on him over the 2G report, according to sources.
Human Resource Development Mminister Kapil Sibal makes an emotional appeal to the Diaspora to collaborate with Indian educational institutions on Day one of the 9th Pravasi Bharatiya Diwas, reports Prasanna D Zore.
In his keynote address at the 98th Indian Science Congress at SRM University near Chennai, Sibal said that this would be achieved by measures including generous financial support and access to external funding.
In the second and final part of his analysis of the draft Lokpal Bill, Union Minister Kapil Sibal lists out how the Lokpal could be detrimental to the functioning of the judiciary and the exucutive
After a not so pleasant experience of engaging with Anna Hazare's team in drafting of the Lokpal Bill, the government says that there will be no such experiment in the future.
Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal on Wednesday said the growth in the sector is essentially centered on adequate spectrum availability, assuring government will make all efforts to provide requisite airwaves to meet industry's demand.
Sibal, who is also looking after the telecom ministry, claimed that change of telecom policy by the then communication minister Pramod Mahajan in 1999 from the auction model to the revenue share model eventually led to the first come first serve controversy of 2001.