-The Hindu “What is government talking about NEP when it cannot sustain gains of an existing project?” A World Bank funded project to take graduates from elite institutions to rural and remote engineering colleges in poorer States is coming to an end in March, leaving more than 1,200 assistant professors out of a job and some rural colleges bereft of half their faculty. The Centre is preparing its own MERITE project with...

-Livemint.com * Trying to start a new life is turning out to be difficult due to a collapse in demand. A ground report from Bihar. * Consumption of drugs has spiked to dangerous levels. So much so that cough syrup brands, sedative drugs like Netravet and an adhesive named Sunfix are household names ARARIA/ NEW DELHI: Bergachi Chowk is a busy intersection, a short ride away from Araria town in northern Bihar, an...

-PTI/ The Hindu The 2019 study, spanning 40 years of satellite observations across India, China, NEPal and Bhutan, indicates that climate change is eating the Himalayas’ glaciers, the researchers said. As a part of the Nanda Devi glacier broke off in Uttarakhand’s Chamoli district on Sunday, leading to massive floods, a study published in 2019 had warned that Himalayan glaciers have been melting twice as fast since the start of this century...

-The Indian Express No announcements on recovering learning loss, support for children at risk of not returning to school. The government’s proposed spending on education next year has been cut by Rs 6,000 crore at a time when the Covid-19-induced disruption is expected to have exacerbated students’ learning loss and school dropout rates. The total education budget was slashed by 6 per cent from Rs 99,311 crore in 2020-21 to Rs 93,224 crore...

Commenting on the recently released fifth round of National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5) data for 17 states and five Union Territories (UTs) in an article published in The Indian Express (dated 6th January, 2021), Arvind Subramanian and his co-authors have stated that India has made progress on certain outcomes, including infant mortality rate (IMR), under-five mortality rate (U5MR) and neonatal mortality rate (NNMR). Relying on various rounds of NFHS data,...