The new curriculum sought to overcome the visual baggage of old textbooks. Today, India debates whether or not cartoons should be included in school textbooks. Such debates are welcome to improve our understanding of school education in general, and textbooks in particular. But before the review committee throws all cartoons out of the school tub, it would help to understand a few facets of textbook preparation, especially the selection of visuals. Locating...

-The Telegraph A survey has identified 1,132 children in the age-group of 6 to 14 from eight districts as victims of seasonal migration who ended up working under woeful conditions in brick kilns outside Jharkhand. The study, conducted by city-based NGO Association for Social and Human Awareness (ASHA) and Tomorrow’s Foundation, Calcutta, covered 50 villages in Gumla, Lohardaga, Latehar, Ranchi, Khunti, East Singhbhum, West Singhbhum and Seraikela-Kharsawan. A glaring fact that emerged was...

A rural Indian spending Rs. 22.50 a day would not be considered poor by a Planning Commission whose Deputy Chairman's foreign trips between May and October last year cost a daily average of Rs. 2.02 lakh Pranab Mukherjee's stirring call for austerity tugs at the national tear ducts. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has pleaded for it in the past and watched his flock embrace it creatively. With the Finance Ministry even...

Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar’s statement in Parliament that the Government plans to shift subsidies from chemical fertilizers to organic manures has finally earned him some admiration from grassroots organisations working with small and marginal farmers in the country’s vast dry-lands. Pawar’s statement, if translated into policy action, may go a long way in improving the condition of some of India’s poorest farmers in the rain-fed areas which account for...

The grand old  man of Indian cartooning RK Laxman has a delightful anecdote that embodies the charm of  political cartooning. Soon after the 1962 Sino-Indian war, Laxman lampooned Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and his much-maligned defence minister Krishna Menon. That evening, Laxman got a call from the prime minister’s office. Picking up the phone, he was petrified of being at the receiving end of Nehru’s ire. He need not have...