Balaiah, a Dalit farmer in drought-affected Mahabubnagar district of Andhra Pradesh wanted a decent, English-medium education for his son that earned him a white-collar, job. However, as part of this quest, in the last three years, his son Shekhar had shifted five schools — all private English-medium schools with fees ranging from Rs 50 to Rs 550 per month. Despite attending school regularly, Shekhar’s efforts to learn seemed to fail...

While a country like China devised practical ways to deliver healthcare to rural populations by deploying its band of ‘barefoot doctors’ from the 1960s in a transitional phase, and then went on to expand full-fledged medical education facilities that enabled national coverage to a great degree, chronic shortages of doctors in rural India six decades after Independence remain a worry. The allopathic doctor-patient ratio is a dismal 1:1,722. Nevertheless, the...

While the human resources development ministry is currently focused on weeding out poor-quality private education providers in the higher education space, a very different picture obtains as far as primary and secondary education is concerned. At a time when the government is almost certainly going to increase expenditure on the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan (SSA) and is still working on the costs of the Right to Education (RTE) Bill, the findings...

The fraction of Scheduled Caste children enrolled in schools is dropping even though Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes are improving their presence in admission rosters, the government’s latest statistics show. The number of enrolled Scheduled Caste children for every hundred students has dropped for a second consecutive year, the statistics released today by the National University for Educational Planning and Administration revealed. The statistics were collected by the district information system...

KODAKARAI (KRISHNAGIRI): Awareness programmes and action against the perpetrators have not been able to put an end to child marriage in Kodakarai, a village situated on a hill in Denkanikottai taluk. “Girl students are prevented from going to school on attaining puberty and marriage is conducted. This is our tradition,” says Rudrappa, village elder. “We couldn’t give education to girls due to various factors. Girl students can study up to Std....