"Language diversity should not be seen as a development liability, but as an economic asset."
Ganesh Devy, scholar-activist, on the People’s Linguistic Survey of India (Outlook, September 9)
"Pens and books are the weapons that defeat terrorism."
Malala Yousafzai, 16-year-old Pakistani education activist who survived a 2012 Taliban assassination attempt, presiding over inauguration of Europe’s largest regional public library, in Birmingham (Time, September 16)
"The Right to Education Act of 2009 carries the seeds of undermining the very right it proposes to guarantee. If the letter of this law had been enforced, all unrecognised schools which on average provide better education than the nearest recognised government school, would have been shut down as of April 1, 2013, turning down the “right” of tens of millions of children into a curse."
Arvind Panagriya, professor of Indian political economy at Columbia University, on ill-considered legislation shackling the economy (Times of India, September 21)
"Extreme certitude, of the sort we observe in Gujarat’s chief minister Narendra Modi, is actually a negative quality when coupled with a lack of proper education. Modi has never been to college and his degree is from a correspondence course."
Columnist Aakar Patel on ‘What it means to have an uneducated leader’ (Mint Lounge, September 28)
"The Congress is not a political party. And Rahul is not just any leader. He is an owner who expects rich dividends."
Prabhu Chawla, well-known journalist, in ‘It takes much more than just talk to become country’s maximum leader’ (The New Sunday Express, September 29)
"Frequent corruption scandals have dominated the political agenda since 2010. Three years on from when the Commonwealth Games scandal first grabbed the headlines, the government has made little progress in strengthening the legal framework... proposed changes in legislation stalled before Parliament."
Report of the UK-based Maplecroft which in its global corruption risk index ranks India as the 69th most graft-prone nation terming it an extremely risky place to do business (The Economic Times, September 30)