-News18.com The new National Education Policy 2020 (NEP 2020 hereafter) has rekindled the debate on the various kinds of problems in Indian education. One of the problems which has bothered me is the need for reforms in rural government elementary schools, more specifically the need for addressing the problem of sub-optimal schooling experiences and poor learning outcomes of poor rural children. The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2014 brought out...

-The Indian Express The proposed policy, instead of addressing the causes and consequences of under-age marriages, may instead produce adverse, suboptimal outcomes affecting the poor and marginalised the most. Should women’s legal age for marriage be raised? The answer to this seemingly simple question is not so simple, because the question is not simply about replacing age 18 with 21. Rather, it deals with the social origins of a “problem” not easily...

Huge sums of money are allocated for the rural and agrarian sectors by the Union Government in its annual budget every year, and rightly so. But in the absence of an adequate number of officials in rural areas, can the various schemes and programmes of the government be implemented properly? We will find the answer if we think about this issue deeply and the answer that would emerge should bother...

-Newslaundry.com Such interrogations have to happen officially, they cannot question me about my sources and contacts over tea.’ A journalist in Uttar Pradesh’s Lucknow was interrogated by the Special Task Force of the state’s police after reporting on low-quality personal protective equipment kits supplied to hospitals and colleges in the state. On April 17, Lucknow-based journalist Manish Pandey of News1 India, a Hindi news channel, broke the story of a letter sent by...

-Hindustan Times The CAA-NPR-NRC controversy may deter citizens from offering authentic information Amid the anger and acrimony over the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), the National Population Register (NPR), and a possible National Register of Citizens (NRC), which the government has said has not been finalised yet, there has been little thought regarding its effects on another growing challenge — the quality of official data. In the last few years, official data...