Hyderabad: Acting tough on the suicide of an intermediate student, the Telangana government on Monday cancelled affiliation of a corporate junior college where the deceased was studying.
The Board of Intermediate Education announced the cancellation of affiliation of Sri Chaitanya College, Narsingi, where 16-year-old Satwik hanged himself due to harassment by the principal, teacher and others. The order will come into effect from next academic year.
The intermediate first-year (Class 11) student hanged himself in the classroom after study hours on the night of February 28.
In a suicide note, the student wrote that he was taking the extreme step due to mental torture by the principal and three others.
Based on the suicide letter and a complaint lodged by the student’s parents, police arrested principal (Administration) Akalanakam Narasimha Chary, principal Tiyyaguru Siva Ramakrishna Reddy, warden Kandaraboina Naresh, and vice principal Vontela Shoban Babu. They were sent to judicial custody.
Police have charged the four with harassment and insulting the victim in the name of studies, thereby forcing him to take the extreme step.
Police in its remand report stated that the principal and others used insulting words and even beat up Satwaik in front of other students, making him mentally upset. On the day when the student died by suicide, his parents had come to the college to meet him. After they left, Chary and Ramakrishna Reddy used foul language.
Meanwhile, the education department on Monday held a meeting with representatives of various private colleges to discuss ways to prevent such incidents. The Board of Intermediate Education decided to constitute a committee to control misleading advertisements by the colleges.
The officials also announced that action will be taken against the colleges conducting classes beyond the fixed hours. Board of Intermediate Education Secretary Sunil Mittal said that the biometric system will be implemented next academic year.
New Delhi: American Airlines has banned the Indian passenger, who had allegedly urinated on a fellow passenger while being drunk on a New York-New Delhi flight.
The accused, identified as 21-year-old Arya Vohra, a student at a US university, has been banned by the airline.
The airline said in a statement that it will not allow the passenger on board in the future.
The statement further said that the American Airlines flight AA292 from John F Kennedy International Airport to Indira Gandhi International Airport was met by local law enforcement upon arrival due to a disruptive customer. The flight landed safely at 9.50 p.m. on Saturday.
“Upon aircraft arrival, the purser informed that the passenger was heavily intoxicated, and was not adhering to crew instructions on board. He was repeatedly arguing with the operating crew, was not willing to be seated and continuously endangering the safety of the crew and aircraft.
“After disturbing the safety of fellow passengers, finally urinated on a passenger seated on seat 15G,” the airlines said.
Hyderabad: Taking school-weaved love stories to a new level, a cupid-struck female teacher working at a school in Chandanagar eloped with her student.
The teacher and student eloped on February 16 and went to Bengaluru. The family of the student complained at the Gachibowli police station and a case of kidnapping was booked while the grandparents of the teacher approached the Chandanagar police where a ‘woman missing’ case was booked.
The police began enquiry into the missing cases and the investigation was in progress two days later, the teacher and the student returned to their homes. The families approached the police and withdrew their complaint.
Police probe into the cases revealed the teacher tutors the student at a school in Chandanagar and both of them are in “love” for more than one year. The woman and the boy decided to elope and planned for February 16.
The police counselled the student and the teacher and let them off.
SRINAGAR: Authorities in Jammu and Kashmir are all set to implement the Students Police Cadet (SPC) Scheme among the students of 8th and 9th standard.
In this regard, Officer on Special Duty (OSD) with Director of School Education Kashmir (DSEK) has sought details of already identified students from Chief Education Officers (CEOs) of the region.
The OSD in a letter to CEOs has said, “I am directed to request you to furnish the list of already identified students of 8th and 9th class for Implementation of SPC scheme in the UT of Jammu & Kashmir.”
The officer has further said that the list should reach DSEK by or before March-6-2023.
According to the official documents, more than 1400 students of classes 8th and 9th have been identified from all districts of the region.
Pertinently, SPC project is a school-based youth development initiative that trains high school students to evolve as future leaders of a democratic society by inculcating within them respect for the law, discipline, civic sense, empathy for vulnerable sections of society and resistance to social evils.
Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) had directed the JK Police to launch a Student Police Cadet scheme in all 22 districts of the UT in both private and government schools to keep youth away from anti-social activities.
The project also enables youth to explore and develop their innate capabilities, thereby empowering them to resist the growth of negative tendencies such as social intolerance, substance abuse, deviant behavior, and anti-establishment violence.
Equally, it strengthens within them commitment towards their family, the community, and the environment. (KNO)
An 18-year-old first-year engineering student at CMR Engineering College, located in the Gundla Pochampally municipal limits, died due to cardiac arrest on Friday.
The deceased who is identified as Sachin collapsed suddenly while walking in the corridor on the campus. Though he was rushed to CMR Hospital, doctors declared him dead.
As per the details of the incident that took place in the afternoon, Sachin was along with his friends when he collapsed.
It is also reported that the student had attended the classes before the incident.
After receiving confirmation from the doctors that that he died of a cardiac arrest, his parents, who live in Suchitra, Rajasthan, were informed. Later, the college authorities handed over his body to them.
It is not the first incident, earlier too two such cases wherein young persons died of cardiac arrest in recent times. A 19-year-old boy died in the Adilabad district while dancing at a marriage function, and another young person collapsed while playing badminton and never recovered.
Warangal: Two persons were arrested in connection with the ongoing probe into the alleged suicide of a third-year BTech student at a private engineering college in Narsampet on Monday, the Warangal police commissioner informed.
The arrested accused persons were identified as Ajmera Rahul, a former friend who is alleged to have circulated her photographs on social media, and an accomplice.
Twenty-year-old Rakshita was found hanging at a relative’s place in Warangal town on Sunday night.
“The third-year Btech student, Rakshitha, committed suicide after her former friend Ajmera Rahul made her photos viral on social media upon learning that she was to marry a friend with whom she was quite close,” Warangal CP AV Ranganath said.
It was alleged that the death of the BTech student was the fallout of online harassment by her former friend Rahul.
A case of abetment was registered against the accused and his accomplice and they were remanded in judicial custody after being produced in court, the Warangal CP said.
Further investigation is underway.
In an earlier incident, on February 22, the junior doctor allegedly tried to kill herself by self-administering some injections at the Kakatiya Medical College. She died on February 26.
In a statement, the NIMS said, “In continuation to the health update of Dr Preethi, despite continues efforts of Multidisciplinary team of Specialist Doctors, she could not be saved and (was) declared dead on 26/02/2023 at 9.10 pm.”
The three liberal justices and Amy Coney Barrett all raised questions about whether the states had standing to bring the case. A big wild card is three other Republican appointees — Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, and Roberts — all of whom were silent on the standing question, even though they seemed sharply critical of the merits of the case.
Here’s POLITICO’s look at five key aspects of Tuesday’s closely-watched arguments on one of the Biden administration’s highest-profile policy initiatives:
John Roberts: Size matters
One particular fact about the Biden administration’s education debt relief program really seemed to be galling to Chief Justice John Roberts: It’s so darn big.
Roberts seemed fixated on the sheer amount of the debt cancellation the Education Department was planning to offer before the courts froze the effort: an estimated $400 billion.
Not content with the B-word that made astronomer Carl Sagan famous, the chief justice turned to the even more gargantuan T-word at least four times to make the debt relief program sound simply enormous.
“We’re talking about half a trillion dollars and 43 million Americans,” Roberts intoned just minutes into the arguments Tuesday. “Congress shouldn’t have been surprised when half a trillion dollars is wiped off the books?”
That became the prevailing framing of the program for Roberts and many of his colleagues, even liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
Justice Samuel Alito uncharitably characterized the administration’s arguments this way, perhaps with inspiration from the late Senate Majority Leader Everett Dirksen: “When it comes to the administration of benefits programs, a trillion dollars here, a trillion dollars there, it doesn’t really make that much difference to Congress.”
Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar told the conservative justices they were making a mistake to put so much emphasis on the overall cost and insisted it was proportionate to the need. “I recognize that this is a big program,” she said, adding, “but that’s in direct reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic, which itself was a really big problem.”
Did Kavanaugh compare student loan relief to Korematsu?
One of the most jarring comparisons at Tuesday’s arguments came when Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested that the dangers posed by Biden’s debt relief plan could be akin to those from some of the worst excesses of presidential power. Kavanaugh mentioned the seizure of steel mills by President Harry Truman in 1952.
Another leading example that the Trump appointed-justice didn’t cite directly is the internment President Franklin Roosevelt ordered of about 120,000 people of Japanese descent during World War II, a policy blessed by the Supreme Court in 1944 in Korematsu v. U.S., a decision many Americans hold in disgrace.
“Some of the biggest mistakes in the Court’s history were deferring to assertions of executive emergency power. Some of the finest moments in the Court’s history were pushing back against presidential assertions of emergency power. And that’s continued not just in the Korean War, but post-9/11 in some of the cases there,” said Kavanaugh, who worked in President George W. Bush’s White House during the September 11 attacks.
While Kavanaugh said that history left him concerned about the Biden policy, he later seemed to backtrack a bit, pointing to an amicus brief calling the debt relief plan “a case study in abuse” of those powers. “I’m not saying I agree with that,” the conservative justice quickly added, muddling the question.
The most pointed rejoinder to Kavanaugh came from Justice Elena Kagan, who sits next to Kavanaugh and often trades quiet asides with him during arguments. She said Biden’s action didn’t sideline Congress as other presidents have, but directly embraced Congressional authority.
“Congress used its voice in enacting this piece of legislation,” the Obama appointee said, referring to the 2003 law allowing the Education secretary to waive various rules during emergencies. “All this business about executive power, I mean, we worry about executive power when Congress hasn’t authorized the use of executive power.”
Where’s MOHELA?
The Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority, known as MOHELA, figured heavily in the justices’ debate over whether the GOP states had standing to bring their lawsuit in the first place.
Missouri, one of the states, argues that it can advance its case based on harms to MOHELA, which is a state-created entity that will face a reduction in revenue under Biden’s student debt relief plan.
Prelogar, representing the Biden administration, conceded that if MOHELA itself had brought the lawsuit, the government wouldn’t contest its standing to bring such a case. But she said that Missouri couldn’t adopt MOHELA’s injuries as its own.
Several of the justices also seized on the fact that MOHELA wasn’t part of the case.
“If MOHELA is an arm of the state, why didn’t you just strong-arm MOHELA and say, ‘you’ve got to pursue this suit?’” Barrett asked the lawyer representing the GOP states.
“That’s a question of state politics,” responded James Campbell, the Nebraska solicitor general who was representing the group of Republican states, including Missouri.
Kagan suggested the state of Missouri was so far removed from MOHELA that the attorney general had to submit a public records request to obtain documents from the company. “If MOHELA was willing to hand you over the documents, you wouldn’t have filed a state FOIA request,” she said.
Alito, who appeared sympathetic to the state’s argument for standing, speculated that MOHELA might have been worried about its contract with the Education Department under which the company is paid to manage millions of federal student loan borrower accounts. “Do you think there might be a dependent relationship between agencies like MOHELA and the federal government since we’re speculating about why they’re not here?”
Indeed, MOHELA has publicly distanced itself from the GOP states’ lawsuit. The company has said its “executives were not involved” with the Missouri attorney general’s decision to file a lawsuit.
MOHELA officials from the company also privately sought to reassure Democratic congressional aides and Biden administration officials that they were not involved in the lawsuit, POLITICO previously reported.
Sotomayor tugs at heartstrings
In hours of debate on complicated legal questions of standing, statutory interpretation and separation of powers, one soliloquy by Justice Sonia Sotomayor stood out: She detailed what hangs in the balance for borrowers in personal terms.
“There’s 50 million students who … will benefit from this who today will struggle,” Sotomayor said, somewhat inflating the number of federal student loan borrowers who would benefit. (The Education Department estimates the total is roughly 42 million).
“Many of them don’t have assets sufficient to bail them out after the pandemic,” the Obama appointee said. “They don’t have friends or families or others who can help them make these payments. The evidence is clear that many of them will have to default. Their financial situation will be even worse because once you default, the hardship on you is exponentially greater. You can’t get credit. You’re going to pay higher prices for things. They are going to continue to suffer from this pandemic in a way that the general population doesn’t.”
Sotomayor also seemed to warn her colleagues against substituting their judgements about fairness and need for those the administration made in setting up the debt relief program.
“What you’re saying is now we’re going to give judges the right to decide how much aid to give them,” Sotomayor said during an exchange with Campbell. “Instead of the person with the expertise and the experience, the Secretary of Education, who’s been dealing with educational issues and the problems surrounding student loans, we’re going to take it upon ourselves.”
A former Education secretary makes an appearance:
Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who invoked the HEROES Act in 2020 to extend the pandemic moratorium on student loan payments, was among those who watched the arguments from the court gallery.
DeVos has been sharply critical of student debt relief and signed an amicus brief with other former Republican education secretaries that blasted the proposal as unconstitutional.
Under her leadership, the Education Department developed a legal opinion concluding that the agency lacked the legal authority to cancel large amounts of student debt without new Congressional approval. The Biden administration last August rescinded the department’s legal opinion and issued its own memo concluding that the HEROES Act provides a basis for broad-based debt relief.
Several Biden Education Department officials also attended the arguments, including Rich Cordray, the head of the department’s student aid office, who oversees implementation of the debt relief program.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Chief Justice John Roberts emerged as one of the most hostile voices on the court towards the debt relief plan, repeatedly invoking its overall cost and raising questions about its fairness.
“We’re talking about half a trillion dollars and 43 million Americans,” Roberts said early in the arguments, questioning why the court shouldn’t expect Congress to explicitly bless a program of such mammoth scope.
Roberts also seemed to skewer the Biden administration’s claim that the debt cancellation plan was not much different from existing programs that forgive student debts in specific circumstances.
“Because there’s a provision to allow [a] waiver when your school closes…because of that Congress shouldn’t have been surprised when half a trillion dollars is wiped off the books?” the chief said skeptically.
Roberts also said the administration’s decision not to wait on specific debt-forgiveness legislation may have cut short debates Congress could have had about whether student loan recipients were getting special treatment that people who paid off their loans or chose not to attend college did not.
“Nobody’s telling the person who was trying to set up the lawn service business that he doesn’t have to pay his loan,” the chief justice said. “He still does, even though his tax dollars are going to support the forgiveness of a loan for the college graduate who’s not going to make a lot more than him over the course of his lifetime.”
Justice Samuel Alito also hammered away at the perceptions of unfairness. “Why is it fair? Why is it fair?….Why was it done?” he asked the lawyer representing the Biden administration, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar.
In all, four of the conservative justices–Roberts, Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch–seemed most skeptical of the claimed legal basis for the debt relief plan, while all three of the court’s liberals appeared inclined to reject the challenges to the program.
The high court’s two other members–Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett–were less clear in their views. Barrett, notably, questioned some of the GOP states’ arguments that they had standing to bring the lawsuit.
Kavanaugh seemed opposed to allowing the emergency authority Congress passed two decades ago to be used to uphold a program giving debt relief to 95 percent of federal borrowers. He even seemed to suggest the relief was akin to some of the worst perceived excesses of executive power in U.S. history.
“Some of the biggest mistakes in the court’s history were deferring to assertions of executive or emergency power. Some of the finest moments in the court’s history were pushing back against presidential assertions of emergency power,” Kavanaugh said. “Given that history, there’s a concern, I suppose, that I feel, at least, about how to handle an emergency assertion.”
But later in the session Tuesday, Kavanaugh acknowledged that the language Congress used allowing the education secretary to “waive” requirements in a crisis was “extremely broad.”
The liberal members of the court appeared to largely agree with the Biden administration that a 2003 law, the HEROES Act, gives the Education Department broad authority to help borrowers respond to national emergencies.
“Congress doesn’t get much clearer than that,” Kagan said. “We deal with congressional statutes every day that are really confusing. This one is not.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor acknowledged the staggering sums of money involved, but said it was unsurprising given the scope of the programs and the pandemic. She noted that the forbearance the Trump administration began in 2020 and the Biden administration continued costs about $5 billion per month. But she said all the talk of the cost was irrelevant to the legal questions involved.
“It’s an outrageous sum,” Sotomayor acknowledged. “It’s not a question of money. It’s a question of Congress’ intent.”
Among those in the gallery for the debt relief arguments was former secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.
Rich Cordray, the Education Department’s student aid chief, was among the Biden administration officials who attended.
At issue in the cases is whether the Biden administration can unilaterally cancel student debt under the HEROES Act, which gives the Education Department special powers to help student loan borrowers respond to national emergencies.
The law says that the secretary of Education may “waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision” related to federal student loans “as may be necessary to ensure that” borrowers “are not placed in a worse position financially” because of a national emergency.
The Biden administration argues that it needs to cancel student debt for most borrowers to avoid a surge of defaults when it resumes collecting payments for the first time since the pandemic began.
Republican states, led by the attorneys general of Nebraska and Missouri, meanwhile, argue that the law is meant to allow the Education Department to ease some requirements on a temporary basis, not permit the mass discharge of student loan debt. They contend that the Biden administration’s pandemic rationale was a pretext to fulfill a longstanding demand from progressives that predated the Covid emergency.
Indeed, since the plan was announced and a flurry of lawsuits were filed last year, the administration has indicated it expects to end the public health emergency related to the coronavirus pandemic on May 11.
The justices on Tuesday also heard a second challenge to the debt relief program filed by two federal student loan borrowers who complain that they were excluded in whole or in part from the program because it doesn’t extend to those whose loans are now owned by commercial entities and because of limits on the plan’s benefits for those who did not receive Pell Grants.
Both cases at the high court also raise questions about whether the plaintiffs have legal standing to sue over the program, regardless of its ultimate legality.
The legal challenges to Biden’s student debt plan, first announced in August, landed at the Supreme Court late last year after speeding through lower courts. The Supreme Court agreed to hear the cases even though federal appeals courts had not yet ruled on the merits of either one.
The Biden administration has already extended the pause on student loan payments and interest into the summer to give time for the Supreme Court to issue its rulings in the cases, which are expected by the end of June.
The Education Department is currently preparing to resume collecting payments from borrowers in September, but that timeline could change in the coming months.
Even before a final decision, the skepticism from many justices on Tuesday is likely to intensify pressure on the White House to prepare an alternative plan for delivering debt relief.
Progressives have urged the Biden administration to invoke another legal provision to cancel student debt if its pandemic-related rationale gets shut down by the Supreme Court. They’ve pointed to a provision of the Higher Education Act that allows the Education Department to “compromise” or “settle” student loan debts owed to the agency.
The Biden Education Department has already used that settlement authority to discharge billions of dollars worth of federal student loans, mostly for borrowers who claimed they were defrauded by a for-profit college. But it hasn’t said publicly whether it would use that provision to cancel debt more broadly.
White House officials have said they’re confident in their legal authority under the HEROES Act and aren’t drafting alternative plans.
During the roughly four weeks that the Education Department accepted applications, nearly 25 million Americans signed up for the program.
A POLITICO analysis of those applications found that borrowers from lower-income ZIP codes and majority non-white neighborhoods submitted applications at a higher rate than did those living in wealthier and majority-white areas. It also found that applications were more likely to come from blue states and congressional districts won by Democrats.
In total, the Education Department estimates that about 40 million federal student loan borrowers would qualify for the program based on their 2020 or 2021 income. Borrowers must earn below $125,000 individually or below $250,000 as a couple to receive the relief.
Department officials approved about 16 million borrowers for debt relief until it was forced to halt the processing of applications in November in response to a court order.
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New Delhi: The UK issued a total of 2,836,490 visas in 2022, out of which 25 per cent went to India, the highest number issued to any country, British High Commissioner to India Alex Ellis said on Tuesday.
Indian nationals received the highest number of student visas which went up by 73 per cent from 2021. India was also issued 30 per cent of visit visas, which is the largest share compared to any other country, Ellis said, adding that the work visas increased by 130 per cent in the year 2022.
Nearly a quarter of all international students in Britain are from India, and Indian investment into the UK supports 95,000 jobs across the UK.
The UK Immigration Statistics, published in August 2022, showed that nearly 118,000 Indian students received a student visa in the year ending June 2022 — an 89 per cent increase from the previous year.
India has overtaken China as the largest nationality being issued sponsored Study visas in the UK.
The announcement came even as India and Britain opened their visa application process for students to apply for the new Young Professionals Scheme (YPS) under the India-UK Migration and Mobility partnership.
Launched last month, the scheme allows Indian citizens between 18 and 30 years old to live and work in the UK for up to two years.
Announcing the scheme’s opening on Tuesday, Indian High Commissioner to the UK Vikram Doraiswami said: “Under the Young Professionals Scheme, announced about a month ago, young citizens of India and the UK can visit each other for up to two years at a time.”
“I am pleased to be able to tell you that the scheme goes live from February 28. We will be launching this simultaneously in Delhi and in London, respectively for Indians to come to the UK and British citizens to go to India,” he added.
The UK government announced that 2,400 visas will be made available to eligible Indians under the scheme for which the last date of application is set on March 2 at 2:29 pm (IST).
Under the relief plan, anyone making less than $125,000 a year could have their student loans cut by $10,000.
of the United States the supreme court will hear the president on tuesday Joe Biden a plan that would seek to eliminate nearly $400 billion in student loan repayments.
The Supreme Court is expected to make a final decision by the end of June on whether millions of Americans will have their loans forgiven.
Under the relief plan, anyone making less than $125,000 a year could have their student loans cut by $10,000. $20,000 of loans for students with state need-based aid would be forgiven.
