-The Times of India JAIPUR: Moved by the sight of some students coming to school barefoot in the chilly December weather, Jalore collector Jitendra Kumar Soni, a young IAS officer, started an innovative scheme aimed at providing free shoes to downtrodden and deprived children. Christened as 'Charan Paduka Yojna', the scheme aims at distributing shoes to nearly 25,000 school kids before the Republic Day this year. Soni, who hails from Dhanasar village near...

-Hindustan Times Washington: Mark Zuckerberg’s Free Basics, the free but restrictive internet service that has run into trouble with Indian authorities, has picked up yet another opponent, the World Bank. Its World Development Report released Wednesday called Free Basics, which is a part of Facebook’s internet.org initiative, the “antithesis of net neutrality and a distortion of markets”. The bank is not opposing Free Basics specifically, or its Indian rollout. It believes any attempt...

-The Hindu Gondi is the lingua franca of the Maoist movement today, but All India Radio does not broadcast even a single new bulletin in the language. One winter morning, in Barwani district of Madhya Pradesh, I was watching a group of Adivasi kids peering into their mobile phones. The early morning sun was mellow, and they were so engrossed that they did not notice me drawing near. “We are doing Bultoo...

Representatives of around 20 civil society organizations and NGOs met the Finance Minister Shri Arun Jaitley as part of pre-budget consultation on social sector on 12 January, 2016. Immediately after the pre-budget consultation, a press conference was held by some of these organizations to convey the media persons what demands/ suggestions were made.   Subrat Das, Executive Director of Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability (CBGA, http://www.cbgaindia.org/) informed us that during...

-The Hindu We need to apply a new credo, digital dynamism, that recognises the complex web that is the internet today An unseasonably warm new year has been substituted by a densely spewing fog over the concept of net neutrality. Net neutrality is a specific approach to the economic regulation of the internet. It is based on the premise of the ‘end to end design principle’, in which traffic on the internet is...