-The Economic Times A giant statue in a Lucknow square made 12-year-old Rashi curious. Whose statue is this, she asked her father. Although a BSP worker, Jhanki Ram couldn't go beyond the name, Jyotiba Phule. But not wanting to show his ignorance, he added, "He was a Mahatma who did a lot for the dalit community". Both had come from Etawah to take part in Kanshiram Parinirvan functions this month. For...
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The RTEs of passage by Rukmini Banerji & Michael Walton
India has achieved close to universal enrolment. The small proportion of children who are still out of school, the hardest to reach, will be pulled in by the efforts emanating from the Right to Education (RTE) Act. Now we must focus on the next challenge, a massive and less visible one, that of ensuring that every child gets an effective education of good quality. Schools must give children a real...
More »The richness of the Ramayana, the poverty of a University
-The Hindu The controversial decision earlier this month by the Academic Council of Delhi University to drop A.K. Ramanujan's celebrated essay on the Ramayana, Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translations from the B.A. History (Honours) course has evoked sharp protests from several historians and other scholars. Coming three years after the Hindutva student body, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), vandalised DU's History department to protest against the...
More »The Seven-Billion Mark by Joel E Cohen
One week from now, the United Nations estimates, the world’s population will reach seven billion. Because censuses are infrequent and incomplete, no one knows the precise date—the US Census Bureau puts it somewhere next March—but there can be no doubt that humanity is approaching a milestone. The first billion people accumulated over a leisurely interval, from the origins of humans hundreds of thousands of years ago to the early 1800s. Adding...
More »Gates Foundation’s AIDS Program in India Has Made Uneven Progress Over 8 Years by Donald G McNeil Jr.
A large and costly AIDS prevention program that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation pioneered in India eight years ago has had mixed results, according to a preliminary analysis published on Monday in The Lancet. The foundation spent $258 million on the program from 2003 to 2008. It has since put in $80 million more, but is shifting responsibility to the Indian government. The program, called Avahan, focuses on high-risk groups, like...
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