A stream of men holding bows and arrows slid through the lanes of Raipur's Civil Lines, coming to a startling stop outside chief minister Raman Singh's residence on November 1, the founding day of Chhattisgarh. As the police whisked them away, the tribal protestors told journalists they were asking for the most basic constitutional right: proportional reservation in government jobs.  Eleven years ago, the sprawling state of Madhya Pradesh was trimmed...

Primary education was made compulsory through a central Act a year and a half earlier, but that’s done little to raise the quality of teaching or learning in schools. Several students of class III were not able to read texts of class I, teachers were missing from classrooms, and the government derives achievement from enrolment without factoring in attendance, found a report published by non-profit body Pratham with support from UNESCO...

-The Economic Times   As the government gears up for a year-long campaign to spread awareness about the Right to Education, a report on teaching and learning in rural India finds that progress in learning ability of students has not been commensurate to the massive investment in primary education and increase in enrolment. The study conducted by the ASER Centre, a network of civil society organisations led by Pratham, in collaboration with...

-The Indian Express   A majority of children of primary classes in rural areas are at least two grades below the required level of proficiency in both mathematics and language, according to a study released today. It said that while the ability of children to correctly formulate and write sentences on their own is “exceedingly” low, a high proportion of children in class IV were struggling with basic multiplications and divisions. The Annual Status...

Nearly five lakh college and university teachers are still waiting for arrears under the Sixth Pay Revision the human resource development ministry announced in December 2008 with retrospective effect from January 2006. Most states have implemented the revised package without paying the arrears as they are waiting for assistance from the ministry, which had told them it would bear 80 per cent of the additional cost for the first four years...