Counting the “invisible” children of Mother India.  While the current focus of political debate is on ‘caste and census,' there is another important aspect that deserves attention. This concerns disability. For decades after our independence, there was no effort to actually count how many of us have any disability. There were estimates- informed or otherwise- but no factual figures. All our government's plans and budgets, rules and regulations, proclamations and posturing...

While India’s new Right to Education Act seeks to bring free and compulsory education for all children, it seems to short-change them through an unrealistic vision of the private sector’s involvement. In August 2009, the Right to Education Act was passed in the Indian Parliament with no debate, by the fewer than 60 members who happened to be attending the session that day. Not that the Act was an open-and-shut...

India’s largest public school chain has accepted that it has failed to improve standards of education in its primary classes two years after it launched a revamp plan, following concerns over learning levels of children. In a letter to all its 981 schools spread across the country, the Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan (KVS) has said an internal survey to assess the revamp has found “shortcomings” on all parameters. The revamp plan...

Driven by spiralling prices of essential items, inflation surged into double digits at 10.16 per cent in May, the highest in the last 19 months, adding to the woes of the common man. Soaring inflation, according to analysts, may prompt the Reserve Bank to tighten liquidity at its quarterly monetary policy review scheduled next month. The essential items which have become expensive, directly hitting the pocket of the common man, include pulses,...

Aruna Roy, the prominent political and social activist who spearheaded the campaign to institute the Right to Information Act in the 1990s, is an ardent critic of the anti-people and exclusionary policies of the first and the second United Progressive Alliance governments. A recipient of the Ramon Magsaysay Award for community leadership in 2000, she heads the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathana (a trade union of workers and peasants) in Rajasamand, Rajasthan,...