The Congress rules state and the centre, but money set aside for Rajasthan’s malnourished tribal children does not reach dysfunctional crèches and other urgent needs Three-year-old Bagmati Sahariya lies listlessly on a string cot inside an unlit mud-and-thatched home in Baran district’s Amrod village, 292km south of Rajasthan’s capital Jaipur. When her father Janki Lal (36), a daily wage labourer, lifts her on his shoulder, her bony hands and legs dangle...

There are serious concerns over shortages of food and housing as the country's population is expected to reach 1.45bn by 2035 The Madanpur Khadr colony is a tenement slum on the southern outskirts of Delhi, the Indian capital. A decade ago there was nothing here but green fields, buffaloes wallowing, goats grazing and the odd small dwelling. Now an estimated 40,000 people live in ramshackle, five-storey, brick and concrete homes, 10 to...

India has achieved close to universal enrolment. The small proportion of children who are still out of school, the hardest to reach, will be pulled in by the efforts emanating from the Right to Education (RTE) Act. Now we must focus on the next challenge, a massive and less visible one, that of ensuring that every child gets an effective education of good quality. Schools must give children a real...

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 Times of India   A comprehensive report on teaching and learning inside rural primary schools of five states shows a huge gap between expectations and reality, when it comes to learning. It reveals that more than teacher's educational qualification, gender or work experience what matters most to students is teachers' ability to teach. The study bursts the myth that government schools are overcrowded. Prepared by Annual Survey of Education Report centre...