“She was thrown in the garbage dump outside the village for dogs that ate her. Her only fault — she was the fourth girl born in a poor family,” said Harshinder Kaur, paediatric doctor here, recalling the first time she witnessed discrimination against female infants in Punjab's rural side. “Over a decade ago, I couldn't save that infant and ever since I try to speak for the girls who never...

Maoists in the Indian state of Bihar have apologised to students for blowing up their school buildings. More than 25 school buildings have been razed to the ground by Maoists in Bihar over the last year - at least five have been destroyed in the past week. The rebels said it was necessary to destroy them because they were being used as camps by the security forces. On Tuesday, rebels killed...

Many schools in poorer countries lack adequate water and sanitation facilities, affecting children’s educations and even claiming lives, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) warns in a new report. “Millions of children in the developing world go to schools which have no drinking water or clean latrines – basic things that many of us take for granted,” said Sigrid Kaag, the agency’s Regional Director for the Middle East and North...

Even as the Right to Education came into effect on Thursday, the countdown began for lakhs of unrecognised schools across the country against whom action can be taken under the new law unless they get themselves regularized within the next three years. The task of enforcing this regularization will be humungous if studies indicating the proliferation of unrecognized schools are to be believed. In 2005, in a survey in seven...

Even as the Right to Education Act comes into force in the country yesterday, the Mid-day meal scheme, an ambitious scheme of the previous Congress-led regime under PV Narsimha Rao, has failed to attract children to government schools in the state. Recently Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot admitted that 10 lakh children had dropped out of government schools in the state in the last five years. Official figures from the Rural...