-The Hindu 40% belong to SC/ST communities; 88% of IIT Guwahati dropouts, 76% of IIT Delhi from reserved categories. Almost 63% of the undergraduate dropouts at the top seven Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) over the last five years are from the reserved categories, according to Education Ministry data given in response to a question in the Rajya Sabha today. Almost 40% were from the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe communities. In...

-The Hindu The case for reservations for women and transgender persons in State jobs and higher education The Bihar government recently announced 33% horizontal reservation for women in State engineering and medical colleges. While reservation for Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs), Other Backward Classes (OBCs) and Economically Weaker Sections (EWS) is referred to as vertical reservation, horizontal reservation refers to the equal opportunity provided to other categories of beneficiaries, such as...

-The Hindu Business Line As our governments think and rethink lockdown measures and scheme policy interventions, it is time we, as a society collective, pay attention to our children on the brink of irreversible damage What does it mean to lose one’s childhood to unsung labour? What is it like when books are replaced by bricks, playgrounds by agricultural fields, plastic toys with heavy-metal machines, alphabet recitations by silent cries of help?...

The pandemic's first wave had a devastating impact on the livelihoods of rural workers in Bihar (including the self-employed) last year, according to a survey based research, jointly done by economists from Centre for Development Economics and Sustainability at Monash University, Australia and the New Delhi-based Institute for Human Development. A recent press note issued by the authors of the study shows that almost 94.4 percent of the households participating...

-The Hindu Business Line Scientists, farmer groups urge FSSAI Hyderabad: Several scientists and non-governmental organisations have asked the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) to scrap its plans to make synthetic or chemical fortification of foods mandatory. “A major problem with the chemical fortification of foods, said the letter, is that nutrients don’t work in isolation but need each other for optimal absorption,” they said in a letter to the Food...