-The Hindu Thousands of Indian students travel out of the country for a basic medical degree simply because it is more affordable and less competitive “Wuhan is a beautiful place, you know,” says Vinod*, over the phone, as we talk about the plight of Indian medical students forced to return home two years ago after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. His stammer and long pauses reflect the anxiety that students and...

In the absence of income or expenditure-based headcount ratio, the growth in the real wages (i.e., nominal wages adjusted against retail inflation) of the manual workers is considered to be a good proxy to assess the trends in poverty. This is because the manual, unskilled/ semi-skilled labourers exist at the bottom of the pyramid or economic hierarchy, and most of them belong to the social categories Scheduled Castes (SCs) and...

-The Hindu Freshwater resources are under stress, the principal driver being human activities in their various forms The Global Water System Project, which was launched in 2003 as a joint initiative of the Earth System Science Partnership (ESSP) and Global Environmental Change (GEC) programme, epitomises global concern about the human-induced transformation of fresh water and its impact on the earth system and society. The fact is that freshwater resources are under stress,...

-Hindustan Times Overall, the enrolment of students in classes from pre-primary to higher secondary dipped by 77,585, showed the report released on Wednesday Close to four million students shifted to government-run schools in the 2020-21 academic year, according to a new ministry of education report, which captures how the pandemic affected learning and access to learning during a period when classes went virtual and millions of parents are believed to have lost...

-The Hindu The decimation of BSP has hurt the SP chief the most in polls, say observers For somebody who threw the kitchen sink at the Bharatiya Janta Party during the election campaign, it has been a humbling loss for Samajwadi Party president Akhilesh Yadav in Uttar Pradesh. Observers said everybody knew that nobody could defeat the BJP on the Hindutva pitch but Mr. Yadav got a ‘godsend opportunity’ in the form of...