-Hindustan Times School textbooks in recent decades have frequently become battlegrounds for ideological contestation in India. Most textbook wars are to advance majoritarian perspectives on history and culture. However, a recent very different textbook skirmish broke out about the public and private sectors in healthcare. The story of this ideological clash is bemusing and instructive, illuminating competing perspectives on the nature of education, healthcare and markets in new India. This clash surfaced...

-Hindustan Times Delhi education minister Manish Sisodia on Friday tabled two bills in the Assembly, which he said would revolutionise education reform sand go along way in helping the common man.   The Delhi School (Verification of Accounts and Refund of Excess Fee) Bill 2015, better known as the Fee Regulation Bill, was the first to be presented. “People say that fee of a private school nowadays is more than their salaries, making private...

-The Hindu Business Line As the Right to Information Act completes 10 years, we examine how RTI has changed people’s lives, become a byword for democracy, and helped alter the relationship between citizen and state Mintu Devi’s relationship with the ration shop changed the day she filed an RTI. In the jhuggis of New Seemapuri, situated on the northeastern edge of Delhi, she is a legend. The 37-year-old mother of four is...

-IANS New Delhi: Half of the children residing in slums in New Delhi are underweight, a study released by NGO Child Rights and You (CRY) showed on today. According to the survey on the status of health, nutrition and education of children below the age of six years in slums here, 25.6 per cent of the 50.2 per cent underweight children are severely underweight. Only 31 per cent of the children under the...

-The Indian Express My mother does not work”. In country after country, this expression is heard each time someone describes a woman not engaged in paid employment. A recent study by McKinsey, titled “The Power of Parity: How equality for women could drive $ 2 trillion in global growth”, has evidence that every “stay-at-home” woman directly damages a country’s GDP by billions. Its message is that every woman should “work”; India’s...