JUDGEMENT

B.Sudershan Reddy, J:

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high Where knowledge is free Where the world has not broken up into fragments By narrow domestic walls Where words come out from the depth of truth Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way Onto the dreary desert sand of dead habit Where the mind is led forward by thee Into ever-widening thought and action Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

- Poet Laureate, Rabindranath Tagore I.

2. The vexed question of access to education has hounded India from times immemorial. The futile pleadings of an Ekalavya for a teacher, that could not even be suppressed in the recesses of our cultural consciousness, to the modern day demands for exclusion from portals of knowledge of the “others”, deemed to be unfit even if lip service of acknowledgement is paid that such “unfitness” may be due to no fault of theirs but is rather on account of their social, economic and cultural circumstances, gouges our very national soul. Even as higher levels of knowledge becomes vital for survival, and its technologies become capable o