-The Hindu Business Line Don’t let Modi’s gloss undermine the efforts and achievements of the UPA government, says the former Prime Minister This is the text of a speech delivered at the Congress chief ministers’ conclave in New Delhi on June 9 There is somewhat of a euphoria that our GDP growth since 2014-15 has started accelerating once again. But doubts have been expressed both within and outside government about the validity of...

-The Indian Express To improve the educational status of Scheduled Castes, a fresh understanding of their achievements and challenges is necessary. The concern of scholars, planners and policymakers has been to achieve the goals set in our Constitution: equality, justice and equal opportunity for all. However, in the period after Independence, it was revealed that education was not necessarily linked to social and economic development and the majority of Indians continued...

-The Hindu The Modi government is determined to dismantle the two-pronged welfare paradigm. It is now an established fact that one area where the Narendra Modi administration has acted with a sense of purpose, urgency and resolve is in slashing social expenditure. Be it education, health, agriculture, livelihood security, food security, panchayati raj institutions, drinking water or the Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes sub-plan, central government funds earmarked for social protection have been cut. The...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: School education secretary Vrinda Sarup today voiced concern over the reduced allocation in funds for the midday-meal programme, saying she hoped the finance ministry would restore the budget for something that has helped bring back children to school. "Dialogues are on. We hope the MDM (scheme) would be protected," Sarup told a media conference organised to present the achievements of the human resource development ministry over the past...

-The Hindu For working India’s federal system, one has to go beyond brute parliamentary majorities and grapple with the multilevel government-opposition matrix, which is the architecture of Centre-State power-sharing Apart from the promise of providing a Congress-free India, the most frequent leitmotif of Mr. Modi’s electoral campaign was that he would usher in a new era for Indian federalism. Based on the idea that a state leader’s vision from below could transform...