-Daily Bhaskar   Implementation of the Right to Education (RTE) Act that promises to provide every child between 6 to 14 years' of age compulsory education is facing many hurdles. The Act was implemented in April 2010 which makes free and compulsory education a fundamental right of every child. However, providing quality education continues to be a matter of concern in Jaipur. Several provisions of the Act are not implemented or are poorly...

As many as 17 top officials representing the senior bureaucracy are believed to have amassed or misappropriated nearly Rs 603 crore between 2007 and 2010. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has submitted a list of the officials under investigation to the parliamentary committee on assurances. The CBI says these officers had misappropriated funds from the exchequer and entered into criminal conspiracies by making huge illegal financial transactions. The CBI says it...

A decline of 2.6 million in elementary education enrolments from 2007 to 2010, the years of Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan's trumpeted success, needs careful analysis. Enrolment data, based on school statistics, deals with the supply-side only. Census or NSS data , based on household information, gives us the demand-side of school enrolments. The two should roughly match, as they do in half of India, but not for UP, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh,...

It is a lesson in misplaced enthusiasm. While the Centre has been busy tom-tomming its efforts to send more children to school, enrolment in primary classes across the country has, in actuality, dropped since 2007. Between 2008-09 and 2009-10, enrolment in classes I to IV in Indian schools dropped by over 2.6 million. The biggest setback was witnessed in Uttar Pradesh, where admissions plummeted by over a million in the last...

The Nagla elementary school in this north Indian town looks like many other rundown government schools. Sweater-clad children sit on burlap sheets laid in rows on cold concrete floors. Lunch is prepared out back on a fire of burning twigs and branches. But the classrooms of Nagla are a laboratory for an educational approach unusual for an Indian public school. Rather than being drilled and tested on reproducing passages from...