Twenty-two newbie managers, fresh from B-schools across India, are raring to go. Only, they won’t make spreadsheets to sell soaps or fizzy drinks. From June, they will assist senior bureaucrats across 11 districts of Jharkhand where the Centre is funding uplift schemes. These managers — from IIT-Kharagpur, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS)-Mumbai, Visva-Bharti in Bengal’s Santiniketan, XISS-Ranchi, XLRI-Jamshedpur and others — are Prime Minister’s Rural Development Fellows in some of...

The controversy over a cartoon in an NCERT textbook sends a chill down the spine as it shows the extent to which the culture of intolerance has eaten into the vitals of our democratic polity. The cartoon in question shows B R Ambedkar sitting on a snail (Constitution) and flogging it while Jawaharlal Nehru too is brandishing a whip standing behind Ambedkar. It is clear that he is also aiming his...

-The Economic Times The prospect of political cartoons going out of textbooks is a dangerous one. Lessons will become drab again. Worried scholars say the move could signal a devastating reversal in what was nothing short of a revolution in textbook-writing in India. Besides, an HRD ministry panel had vetted and cleared the text books, they say. A beleaguered NCERT, which designed and published the books, has set up a committee to...

As the government scrambles to contain the political damage from the Ambedkar cartoon, one may be tempted to believe that somebody surreptitiously slipped Shankar's satirical work in the NCERT textbook. Or that the HRD ministry was caught unawares by the political heresy.  However, the fact is that the books were released by NCERT after having been thoroughly vetted by a National Monitoring Committee appointed by the ministry which includes several civil...

As cartoons, like all other images, are constantly subject to fresh interpretation, there is a need to set boundaries within which dissent must be tolerated; or else we run the risk of damaging the task of knowledge building Like many books, works of art, and articles that have been summarily withdrawn from public circulation, for different political reasons, and due to public pressure, the controversial 1949 cartoon by Shankar has been...