Parents and educationists are concerned over posting of several primary school teachers in junior high schools, high schools and higher secondary schools in the four valley districts of Manipur. Students have complained that these teachers could not handle any subject. Chief Minister Okram Ibobi, who is in charge of Education, has said the government will soon appoint an additional 1,300 primary and 600 graduate teachers. The selection test for teachers will...

Misleading data cited in a seminar paper on the situation of the minority community in the State tend to detract from the Left Front government's exceptional record on this count. Abusaleh Shariff, the Chief Economist of the National Council of Applied Economic Research, who was the Member-Secretary of the Sachar Committee, presented a paper on the socio-economic development of Muslims in West Bengal, at a seminar organised by the Institute of...

Jharkhand now boasts a healthy literacy figure of 67.63 per cent, up by almost 14 per cent since 2001. Thanks to the centrally-sponsored Sarva Siksha Abhiyan, almost all the 32,000 villages in the state now have schools compared to only 16,000 in 2000. Provisional census data released today suggests that literacy figures improved from 54 per cent in 2001 to nearly 68 per cent. Male literacy increased from 67 per cent in...

The battle against poverty and inequity can be won only if governments focus on the welfare of adolescents, says a UNICEF report. FINALLY, it has been recognised that adolescents constitute a very critical category in the overall battle against poverty and inequity. It is for this reason that the United Nations Children's Fund's (UNICEF) flagship report, “The State of the World's Children 2011”, focusses exclusively on adolescents and cautions against neglecting...

Census 2011 has brought glad tidings on the literacy front. Delhi's literacy rate - recorded as 86.34% - has gone up by 4.67% in comparison to Census 2001, which recorded a literacy rate of 81.67%. One of the significant developments is the narrowing of the gap between male and female literacy rate - a drop of 2.53% - which is also the highest dip recorded so far. The difference between...