-The Indian Express As efforts are made to make India open defecation free by 2019, the biggest stumbling block is not the lack of enough toilets, but the difficulty in convincing people to start using them. New Delhi: Despite freshly-constructed functioning toilets in their homes, a group of old men in a village in Daniyawan block, about 30 km southeast of Patna city, continued to go out in the fields to defecate....

-The Hindu Officials are still in the process of finding out requirements across the State Chennai: Nearly one month after the State government announced that breakfast will be provided in Schools as part of noon meal scheme, officials are still figuring out the modalities of implementation, including the food variety and age group to be covered. “We are surveying the requirements across the State,” said a senior official from the Department of Social...

-Livemint.com The state government, heavily influenced by the private School lobby, had twisted the law’s rules so much that very few eligible children could jump through its hoops Rohith Vemula’s case brought to the fore the depth of caste and class prejudices institutionally embedded in India’s education system. Babasaheb Ambedkar described these as, “an artificial chopping off of the population into fixed and definite units, each one prevented from fusing into...

-The Hindu Move to give nutrition supplements to anganwadi children draws flak. Bengaluru: Can two grams of a plant-based dietary supplement substitute a wholesome balanced meal for anganwadi children? With the Women and Child Development Department all set to administer Spirulina to severely malnourished children, activists and nutritionists are battling for a wholesome meal instead. As announced in the State Budget, the department has decided to administer two gm of Spirulina for 180 days...

-The Hindu Confining it to just the Ministry of Rural Development would be the most retrograde step in democratic decentralisation in over a quarter century. If, as The Hindu’s exclusive on Wednesday indicates, Prime Minister Narendra Modi were to close down the Ministry of Panchayati Raj, it would confirm one’s worst fears about his government’s hypocritical approach to grass-roots democracy for grass-roots development. This was a lacuna that was evident in the ‘Gujarat...