-The Indian Express Year after year, Pratham's Annual Survey of Education Report, or ASER, tells us about children who go to school but can't read or do basic math. This year, as ASER volunteers fan out across 570 rural districts, Uma Vishnu visits a village in Rampur, a district in UP with some of the worst learning levels in the country, to see what it is to read. Aao, padho." Kusum,...

-The Indian Express Exposure to television and digital media grew by leaps and bounds between 2005 and 2012. From Naxalbari to the Arab Spring, our popular imagination has seen the youth as the harbinger of revolution that breaks down the bastions of privilege. How do we reconcile this with the decisive victory that modern Indian youth have handed to the BJP, whose manifesto focused on entrepreneurship rather than redistribution? I would like...

-The Times of India Mitu Kumari, in charge of a government school in Patahin, a village on the outskirts of Muzaffarpur, Bihar, has a measured enthusiasm for Prime Minister Narendra Modi's announcement that toilets for girls will be built in schools that still don't have this basic facility. For her 146 students and three women teachers, absence of toilets is an intolerable problem. "I have written to everybody, from the village mukhia...

-Economic and Political Weekly   The emphasis on use of digital technologies to bridge the "rural-urban gap" in the union budget is limited to high talk and minimal allocations. The need for a more comprehensive and peoples' participation-oriented rural action plan should have been the focus while setting sectoral allocations, but that is not to be in this mid-year budget. Vipul Mudgal (vipulmudgal@gmail.com) heads the Inclusive Media for Change project at the Centre...

‘ASER’ means impact in Hindustani. If development programs are to lead to desired outcomes, their impact on the ground needs to be regularly assessed. ASER Centre seeks to use simple yet rigorous methods to generate evidence on scale on the outcomes of social sector programs. It also aims to strengthen the link between evidence and action by building the capacity of individuals and institutions to design, conduct, and understand assessments...