-The Hindu Business Line Farmers in Maharashtra are struggling to cope with losses from last month's hailstorm. Satyanarayan Iyer, who travelled extensively through the affected areas, chronicles the region's woe. Shanta Jadhav will never forget that day. It was March 8, a Saturday. The 70-year-old and her husband were in their small hut in Balamthakli village in Ahmednagar district, Maharashtra. At 6.30 in the evening, they were startled by a loud thud,...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Nearly three of every four students shortlisted for the Indian Institutes of Technology this year come from two of the country's 29 school boards, an analysis of the results has shown. The results have confirmed a long-standing suspicion: distribution of students who made it to the elite tech schools is not uniform across the two national and 27 state boards. The analysis has shown that of the nearly...

-The Times of India MUMBAI: Students making it to India's best public engineering colleges this session might have more to tackle than study pressure. Making for a sharp economic divide on campus, two large cohorts of students in the class of 2017 in the IITs are from the upper middle classes and from the lower income groups. This year, one out of every five students (over 20%) who qualified disclosed that the...

-Outlook Social indices topper Kerala just can't stop the baby deaths in its malnutrition-hit tribal Attapady belt Under the thick canopy of a peepal tree, beside the road that winds to Pallur Ooru in Attapady in the Western Ghats, is a small tribal burial ground. There are no tombstones to mark the graves and on closer look one sees tiny mounds where the mud has been disturbed. In a quiet corner,...

-The Telegraph An expert panel has suggested three ways of comparing students’ marks across 26 Class XII boards for admission to about 40 central institutions, amid indications that a percentile-based matching may be approved. One of the other options is based on the calculation of a board’s mean score, and the third on the determination of the mean as well as the standard deviation (a statistical concept), sources told this newspaper. They added...