KEY TRENDS • According to National Sample Survey report no. 583: Persons with Disabilities in India, the percentage of persons with disability who received aid/help from Government was 21.8 percent, 1.8 percent received aid/help from organisation other than Government and another 76.4 percent did not receive aid/ help *8 • As per National Family Health Survey-4 (NFHS-4), the Under-five Mortality Rate (U5MR) was 57.2 per 1,000 live births (for the non-STs it was 38.5)...
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The enrolment myth
-The Indian Express The dismal picture painted in Pratham’s latest Annual Status of Education Report must provoke policymakers to urgently assess and tackle the crisis in India’s primary school education. Pratham, an NGO, has done stellar work these past years in surveying the learning outcomes in schools countrywide. Its 2012 report details a rapid decline in students’ ability to keep up with the syllabus. It has found, for example, that only...
More »Ageing with dignity
-The Hindu The trouble with ageing is that it is inevitable. The truth about ageing in India is that we have not yet built an adequate knowledge base to respond to its multifarious challenges. So says the United Nations Population Fund in its recently released Report on the Status of Elderly in Select States of India. The focus of the study is on the seven States where the aged population is...
More »For richer, for poorer-Zanny Minton Beddoes
-The Economist Growing inequality is one of the biggest social, economic and political challenges of our time. But it is not inevitable, says Zanny Minton Beddoes IN 1889, AT the height of America’s first Gilded Age, George Vanderbilt II, grandson of the original railway magnate, set out to build a country estate in the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina. He hired the most prominent architect of the time, toured the chateaux...
More »In Defence of Public Education-Manabi Majumdar and Kumar Rana
-Economic and Political weekly Drawing on the research on basic education in West Bengal, this essay argues the case for a much criticised public education system, which needs to be reconsidered as regards its potential as a provider of quality education, even while addressing its many failings. The essay follows an approach, both critical and constructive, that underlines the collective onus of the public in realising the value of the public...
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