It is essential for India to raise the level of public expenditure in education to ensure quality. THE failure of the Indian state more than six decades after Independence to provide universal access to quality schooling and to ensure equal access to higher education among all socio-economic groups and across gender and region must surely rank among the more dismal and significant failures of the development project in the country....

More than one billion people will not get the basic sanitation and the clean water promised as such projects shrink sharply as a proportion of global aid budgets. A key development goal to halve the number of people without access to basic sanitation by 2015 will be missed because donor countries have diverted aid money away from unglamorous water projects, according to the World Bank and the charity WaterAid. Aid to...

Classrooms give shelter to cows and buffaloes, while students sit outside in the compound. Children carry their own plates to school for mid-day meals and later rush back home on the pretext of washing the dishes, but never come back for classes. School management committees are told by teachers that no one has the right to seek any information from the school authorities. The scenario gets worse if the panchayat facilitators...

The ends may justify the means, but let's be clear - in rural India, extremes of coercion are being used to encourage toilet use Robert Chambers recently wrote that community-led total sanitation is leading to a development revolution, especially in south Asia. I agree with his assessment of sanitation's importance. In practice, however, the success of community-led efforts often hinges on the use of outright coercion. In my experience, the measures...

-Mid-Day.com   The next time you plan to use a public toilet in Bangalore's south zone, make sure you carry a roll of tissue paper along, since the BWSSB has decided to disconnect waterlines for non-payment of bills. The public Toilets in the city under the banner of Nirmala Sulabh Souchalaya has not paid bills since 2004 and the due amount has added up to Rs. 5,20,017. To make matters worse, the...