-The Telegraph The slump in the GDP and the pain ahead The -23.9 per cent shrinkage in the April-June GDP is not a surprise as nearly half the period witnessed a national lockdown. It’s also not surprising that this loss is the world’s steepest for India’s lockdown was the most stringent and the accompanying fiscal policy response the weakest. But the quarter per cent slump did surprise most analysts who have since...

-GaonConnection.com Chhattisgarh has become the first state in the country to reopen its anganwadi centres amid the COVID-19 to offer health and nutrition services to kids and women After remaining shut for almost half a year, 55,000 anganwadis in Chhattisgarh reopened yesterday on September 7 to provide hot nutritious meals and health services to 1.5 million children under the age of six years, and 0.5 million pregnant and lactating women registered with...

-The India Forum Nandini Sundar teaches at Delhi University. Gowhar Fazili teaches at Ambedkar University Delhi. Academic freedom is about the right to study, teach and research a diversity of viewpoints. Yet, this right that is so crucial for the pursuit of knowledge has seen widespread attacks in colleges and universities across India. The New Education Policy (NEP) 2020 claims it is based on principles that include creativity and critical thinking, constitutional values,...

-Livemint.com Since education policies and government programmes have greater implications for the socially marginalized, they should be open to public scrutiny and debate Anurag Behar’s article on the new educational policy 'A plea to educators at the cusp of a seminal shift in education' on 12 August in Livemint raises some very important and serious concerns and is therefore, deserving of attention. It points to a growing rift between framers of the...

Huge sums of money are allocated for the rural and agrarian sectors by the Union Government in its annual budget every year, and rightly so. But in the absence of an adequate number of officials in rural areas, can the various schemes and programmes of the government be implemented properly? We will find the answer if we think about this issue deeply and the answer that would emerge should bother...