Bihar Government's programme of distributing bicycles to school girls may be a modest intervention but is leading to big changes. A new research-based paper, brought out in August 2013, corroborates the success of the programme and testifies that it is leading to improved school enrollment of girls and arresting their dropout rates (See links below to read full paper and earlier studies on the subject).   Based on econometric and statistical models,...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: India will seek changes to international copyright regulations so that students and researchers can procure photocopies of expensive books without having to pay royalties, a senior government source said. Come December, he said, the Union human resource development ministry will ask the World Intellectual Property Organisation (Wipo) to relax its norms that protect authors' and publishers' commercial rights over their books. The ministry will suggest at the next general...

-The Times of India HUBLI (Karnataka): At least 14 students fell ill in government school in Karnataka's Dharwad district after drinking milk supplied under a government scheme on Monday. Soon after the morning prayer, students of the Kannada Government Girls' Primary school in Kusugal village queued up to have milk under 'Ksheer Bhagya' scheme. Within minutes, a girl complained of stomach pain and started vomiting. Within half an hour, 13 other students...

-The Times of India BANGALORE: In the world's second most populous country, diseases of the heart are the biggest killers. The bigger tragedy is that the number of cardiac specialists graduating every year in India is a meagre 250. The concern among medicos today is not just the limited number of postgraduate seats available in the country's 381 medical colleges, it's also the skewed distribution of seats between subjects. The number of...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Even as minority politics takes centrestage in the wake of recent riots in Uttar Pradesh, a report by the Council for Social Development shows how the UPA government has failed to implement the recommendations of the Sachar Committee, with its response to Muslim deprivation at best being "cautious and minimalist". The report said most of the benefits intended for minorities were being cornered by either...