-The Hindu After a long and painful period of neglect, India promises to devote attention to the issue of preparing all children for primary schooling. The draft National Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) policy aims to end the "current laissez faire situation" that has led to the mushrooming of expensive crèches, play schools, nursery schools and so on that adhere to no particular standard. On the other hand, there is...

-Down to Earth   This defies logic. Despite rapid economic growth, India has often been placed below sub-Saharan African countries that have very high number of malnourished children. But the government has no data to clarify its position. In the first week of September, Parliament’s Committee on Estimates criticised the government, saying: “The committee is surprised to note that in the modern era of Information and Technology, there is no recent official...

-The Indian Express Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar has more than one reason to cheer the Raghuram Rajan committee report's ranking of states on composite development. Apart from being put close to the bottom of the ladder in the new index of underdevelopment, Bihar also scores near the top in "performance", that is, the reduction of underdevelopment - a most sensible parameter introduced in the report - far ahead of Narendra...

-The Indian Express Thiruvananthapuram: Underage marriage among Muslims has ignited a debate in Kerala, with the community's most influential organisation vowing to get legitimacy for the practice while political parties and women's groups have said it would be a setback when Muslim girls have been making strides in education. It was triggered by a government effort to ratify underage marriages that have already taken place, because many such couples were finding...

-The Hindu When a death sentence is given to satisfy the "collective conscience of the community," it raises troubling questions about the fairness of the trial The verdict of death for the bestial gang rape in Delhi last December is based on Supreme Court judgments, which stipulate that capital punishment will be imposed in "the rarest of rare" cases, where the community's "collective conscience is so shocked that it will expect the...