The countdown for implementation of the historic Right to Education Act from April 1 has begun. Complete with a new message - `elementary education of equitable quality is now the right of every child' - and a short awareness film, HRD minister Kapil Sibal has asked chief ministers to cooperate in universalising elementary education. Though Sibal has chosen to launch RTE from Delhi instead of some educationally deprived state, his...

42,000 teachers have not been paid salaries for five to 10 months Even as the State Government attempts to stave off uncomfortable questions about its financial health, claims are surfacing that thousands of government and aided high school teachers have not been paid their salaries for over five months. In some cases, teachers of aided high schools have not been paid for nearly a year. A top official attributed part...

  KEY TRENDS    • A total of 7.55 lakh (755,247) RTI applications were received by the reporting public authorities in 2014-15. This is about 79,000 fewer RTI applications received in 2013-14. The CIC report notes this decline in the number of RTIs received. However almost 90,000 RTI applications were pending decision at the start of the reporting year of 2014-15 *@ • Around 67 percent of men and 54 percent of women interviewed...

KEY TRENDS   • At the national level, the proportion of government schools having facilities like drinking water was 96.39 percent, boys' toilet was 94.64 percent, girls' toilet was 97.03 percent, boundary wall was 60.12 percent, playground was 56.98 percent, ramp was 71.50 percent, CWSN toilet was 19.59 percent, electricity was 56.45 percent and library was 79.36 percent, according to the Unified District Information System For Education (UDISE) 2017-18 (Provisional) *12   • ASER 2019 ‘Early Years’ data shows a clear...