-The Hindu House panel on education discusses COVID-19 impact The Centre is assessing how badly school students have been hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, and will collect States’ surveys on digital education access and learning losses by the end of this month, the School Education Department told a parliamentary panel on education on Monday. The panel asked the Centre to also assess the impact of its own guidelines and interventions, as well as...

-Newslaundry.com The state’s River Training Policy appears designed to allow near unfettered mining of sand and boulders by private contractors, bypassing green clearance and scientific assessment. In November 2020, a few months before floods ravaged Uttarakhand, the deputy collector of Purnagiri in Tanakpur district announced an open auction of tenders to desilt the riverbed in Champawat’s villages. Tenders for government work usually seek the lowest bidder, the contractor willing to do the job...

-The Hindu Remigration of young, trained workers Bihar, Jharkhand workers at minimal levels A survey of young, semi-skilled migrants from rural Bihar and Jharkhand in April 2021 has found that last year’s lockdown led to an informalisation of labour among men, while most of the women simply dropped out of the work force altogether. It also found that the number of out-of-State migrants halved between March 2020 and 2021, with no net effect...

-The New Indian Express At the age of 27, K Rajitha, who grows 10 different crops in her one acre of land at Naguluppalapadu, has become a role model for the local farming community. ONGOLE: At the age of 27, K Rajitha, who grows 10 different crops in her one acre of land at Naguluppalapadu, has become a role model for the local farming community. Reason: She has adopted the Zero Budget...

-The Indian Express In a nation where access to education remains a fundamental issue and where an individual’s success largely depends on access to resources, shaped by socio-economic and caste advantages, 'merit' is just another form of discrimination. While a public health crisis grips the nation, the recent incident at IIT Kharagpur where a professor named Seema Singh at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences allegedly made casteist slurs during a...