HRD ministry and states can be happy as 13th Finance Commission has been the most generous for elementary education allocating Rs 24,068 crore for Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan to all the states for the next five years. It has also fully accepted the demand for grants made by the HRD ministry. Even though funding for Right to Education has not been worked out, the Commission recognises that more funds will be...

Statistical poverty lines should not become real-life eligibility criteria for food entitlements.  Nothing is easier than to recognise a poor person when you see him or her. Yet the task of identifying and counting the poor seems to elude the country's best experts. Take for instance the “headcount” of rural poverty — the proportion of the rural population below the poverty line. At least four alternative figures are available: 28...

South Asian nations including India would not be able to eradicate poverty and ensure minimum education for all by 2015, according to a new poverty index to be released next week in Delhi. The Basic Capabilities Index (BCI) 2009 has found that South Asia will get 80 points on the index by 2015, 10 points higher than the present value of 70. India has got 68 points in the index,...

The study was conducted in six States and is based on interviews of over 51,000 individuals  Findings also underscore the limited awareness on most sexual and reproductive matters Leading sources of information on sexual matters were friends and the media Less than one in three women know that a condom can be used just once, and just one in six know that a condom cannot disappear into a woman’s body. These are...

Monica Das Gupta is a senior social scientist at the World Bank. Her field research in Punjab, when she was at the National Council of Applied Economic Research, established that sex differentials in child mortality in rural Punjab persisted despite relative wealth, socio-economic development including rapid universalization of female education, fertility decline, and mortality decline. Amartya Sen’s writings drew attention to female foeticide and infanticide in Asia that led to...