-The Hindu   The Supreme Court on Wednesday directed the Chief Secretaries of all the States to specify how much additional foodgrains were required for them under the Public Distribution System to ensure that there was no starvation death. A Bench of Justices Dalveer Bhandari and Deepak Verma, passing orders on a petition filed by the People's Union for Civil Liberties on streamlining of the PDS, granted two weeks for the States for...

-The Indian Express   Admitting that the child mapping survey conducted by its officials in December 2010 had left out many city areas while identifying eligible candidates for free education under the Right to Education (RTE) Act, UT Education Department has now roped in a research agency to rectify flaws in the data. The department has already handed over the data from its survey to the Centre for Research in Rural and...

The only bright spot in the latest Census, 2011, was the data on literacy. It seems to be increasing by leaps and bounds. In fact, one would imagine that walking into the forests of Jharkhand, the first man you meet will know how to read and write fluently in Hindi or the local dialect. Or, Bihar which will receive a trophy from the President for achieving the highest growth in literacy...

-The Business Standard   The poor progress made by states in stemming the declining sex ratio (of the number of girls in the 0-6 age group for every 1,000 boys) in the country has prompted Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to write to the 28 state chief ministers on the issue. The recent census showed a decline in states which had earlier not reported one. This had prompted a high-level meeting in the Prime...

-The Hindustan Times   The home ministry has raised concerns that a fresh proposal of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) to independently collect biometric details could lead to duplication of effort and lead to wastage of public funds. The Cabinet had earlier mandated the census commissioner to create the national population register (NPR), a biometrics-based identity system. This required the census commissioner to create a data-base of all residents through door-to-door...