India is setting up a $150-million corpus using funds from the World Bank, European Union and the UK government’s Department for International Development to hatch innovative strategies to universalise secondary education. Called the National Innovation Fund, the corpus will provide financial support to out-of-the-box projects for which budgetary funds cannot be used because of the risk of failure, top government officials have told The Telegraph. “Think of the fund like a...

The RTI juggernaut has begun to roll over Indian babudom. Let us not turn the clock back. Over the past week, there have been reports that the Prime Minister's Office, responding to Sonia Gandhi's muscular intervention, is backing off on the dreaded amendments to the Right to Information Act, 2005. On the other hand, it is worth remembering that the amendments scare has never been too far away. It resurfaced as recently...

Madvi Madka owns 4ha of land in Chingavaram in the Sukum block in central India. The district in which the block is located has become infamous after 6 April, killing of 76 policemen by the Maoists. This is the ground zero of the war between the Indian state and the Maoists, and Madka, who owns 4ha of land—often left fallow because there wasn’t enough water for irrigation—here used to make...

Union Labour Minister Mallikarjun Kharge would present a briefing on the country''s highly successful National Rural Employment Generation Scheme at the first ever meet of G-20 labour ministers here today. Top officials from the US Department of Labour, organisers of the event, said the innovative 100-day rural employment guarantee scheme has been successful beyond the expectations of almost every one. "India has learnt and has refined the strategy. So there is...

Yerawada prison is a place of contrasts. In one part of the 17-acre complex near the city of Pune in the Indian state of Maharashtra, 300 incarcerated women barely see the light of day and live in cramped, unhygienic conditions. But another part of the prison is currently undergoing a makeover. Here, women will soon be allowed to roam the premises and farmland in relative freedom. This will be India's first...