-Newsclick.in The Finance Minister of Uttar Pradesh Rajesh Agarwal presented the Budget for financial year 2018-19 on February 16. The State government allocated Rs. 63,223 crores for overall Education sector which is an increase of 10.90% as compared to 2017-18 in which Rs. 56,993 crores were allocated. Out of this amount, Rs. 50,142 crore will be spent on Primary Education, Rs. 9,387 crore on secondary education and Rs. 2,656 on higher education....

-The Hindu Considered a ‘cousin’ of Madhubani Mithila, but perhaps closer to Bengal’s Kantha work On a late winter morning a group of women — Pinki Devi, Khusbu, Chanchala, Sunita, Nutan and Bhibha Devi among them — sit on a large, grimy, black tarpaulin sheet in the part-shadow of a slouching tree in Bhusra village in Bihar’s Muzaffarpur district. In their hands are colourful fabrics on which are emerging stories told through chain...

-TheWire.in Environmentalist and water management expert Ravi Chopra says river inter-linking will sow the seeds for future conflicts between states. There is nothing new about the proposed river-interlinking project being pushed by the government, and this ‘unnecessary excess’ of a project will create more problems than it promises to solve, says environmentalist and water management expert, Dr Ravi Chopra, the director of People’s Science Institute, Dehradun and a managing trustee of the...

-Hindustan Times A newer generation of politicians has again voiced the demand of giving land to landless Dalit households as a means to resolve the crisis of rural livelihoods. But the relentless pursuit of neo-liberal economic policies and liberalisation has rendered most of these demands Utopian Seven decades after Independence, while a majority of farmers cultivate their own land (however small their holdings may be), most Dalit farmers in much of India...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Be prepared for a hot spring and a scorching summer. The Met office says average temperatures from March to May across half the country are likely to be above normal by more than 1 degree Celsius. These months are expected to be particularly merciless in north India. Delhi, along with Haryana, Punjab and Rajasthan, is likely to see average temperatures soar over 1.5 degrees above normal....