-The Times of India In the space of a decade, between 2001 and 2011, the student population in India exploded from about 229 million to 315 million. That's a jump of nearly 38%. The overall population growth in the same period was 18%. But Census data released on Friday underscores a much bigger shift within these gross figures. Students in the age group 15 to 19 years increased by a dramatic 73%...
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Many degrees of hopelessness in India's villages -Harsh Mander
-Hindustan Times The picture of rural Indian life today that emerges from what is probably the world's largest study ever of household deprivation is sobering and sombre. It describes a massive hinterland still imprisoned in persisting endemic impoverishment, want, illiteracy and indeed hopelessness. It tells a story that every thinking and caring Indian must heed. Advocates of free markets, opposed to building a welfare state, have long argued that accelerated market-led economic...
More »Spare Some Change -Lola Nayar, Arindam Mukherjee, Arushi Bedi, Pragya Singh & Pavithra S Rangan
-Outlook Social spends have been cut, rural India is in crisis, have we got the growth story wrong? When journalist P. Sainath met him, Jain saab, 45, was the ‘head of departments’ cum sports officer and principal of the Government P.G College, Alirajpur, Madhya Pradesh. The meeting was recorded in Sainath’s magnum opus, Everybody Loves a Good Drought, in 1995. As Sainath wrote then: “The schooling system, despite many stupid experiments,...
More »Over 3,000 ‘missing’ kids found at Delhi railway stations in 3yrs -Prawesh Lama
-Hindustan Times New Delhi: For lakhs of travellers, the New Delhi and Old Delhi railway stations may be just dots on the city’s map, but for thousands of children, they are ‘home.’ It is here where the police find most of the children who go missing. As per records, at least 3,321 children were rescued from the two stations in the last three years. This year till June, the railway police rescued...
More »A Metro pillar pathshala puts lives of labourers’ kids on track -Dharvi Vaid & Sanjeev Rastogi
-The Times of India Two sturdy, grey Metro pillars near the Yamuna Bank station are covered with graffiti of a different kind. The walls under the bridge have alphabets scribbled over them and the place echoes with the murmur of children reciting poems as if trying to compete with the rattling of the metro. This is where Rajesh Kumar Sharma, a shop owner, spends his mornings, teaching the 3Rs and more...
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