-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Bihar's midday meal tragedy is a case of the state not heeding the advice of monitoring institutions that have been warning HRD ministry and the state that all's not well with the flagship programme. Monitoring institution reports are discussed at programme approval meetings and referred to states. But there's no action. Monitoring bodies prepare a field report of 25% schools in a state each quarter. In...

-The Hindu Switching to renewable energy sources in the country's midday meal programme will save millions of rupees. But only a few kitchens are doing anything about it, says the author. This is a story of facts and figures and sheer size. Of an auditorium-sized room dense with hot steam from cooking. Of seven tonnes of cooked rice and four tanker-loads of steaming sambar that needed 70 pairs of hands for cutting...

-Frontline The Central government's proposal to hand over the supply of supplementary nutrition to NGOs in the name of "community participation" is surely an invitation for private profiteering on the back of this supposedly public scheme. ENSURING safe and healthy conditions for the reproduction of the population is obviously the most fundamental requirement of any society. So the progress of a society can be determined (and indeed is routinely judged) by the...

-The Hindu The Right to Education (RTE) Act turned three on March 31, 2013. It is certainly a short period to examine its efficacy, yet it is enough to give us a fair idea of the hurdles that are being faced and have to be tackled to get positive results. Most of these hurdles are attitudinal. The services of retired teachers are mostly sought for imparting "special training" to out-of-school children...

-The Indian Express Imphal: Alice Kamei had been missing for two days when Sundari got the call. What the voice on the other end said about her 14-year-old daughter has turned the world of this family living in Chingphu Kabui village in Manipur's Bishnupur district upside down. "It was a call from the RPF (Revolutionary People's Front). They said that Alice had come to them of her own will," says Sundari. "They...