Primary education was made compulsory through a central Act a year and a half earlier, but that’s done little to raise the quality of teaching or learning in schools. Several students of class III were not able to read texts of class I, teachers were missing from classrooms, and the government derives achievement from enrolment without factoring in attendance, found a report published by non-profit body Pratham with support from UNESCO...

-Tribune News Service   A new study on learning and teaching outcomes in government schools of rural India has thrown up significant challenges for the Right to Education Act.It has found that in language and Maths, children are at least two grades behind where they should be and though the RTE Act stresses teacher qualifications immensely, neither higher educational qualifications nor teacher training are associated with better student learning. It is the...

Herding cattle and weaving carpets, on city waste-heaps, at traffic lights, in roadside eateries, in farms and in factories, in brick kilns and coal mines, in brothels and in our homes, children of the poor work at an age when our own are in school or at play. What is remarkable is not just our collective acceptance of such diverging destinies of children merely because of the accident of where they...

The National Mission to improve the delivery of justice is at work. In October 2009, on the basis of a Vision Document adopted at a judicial conference in New Delhi, the Government of India approved in principle a National Mission to reduce pendency and delays in the judicial system and enhance accountability through structural changes, higher performance standards and capacity-building. Many past attempts to achieve the goals did not yield results...

Sonia Gandhi’s ambitious plan to institutionalise political monitoring of the government’s flagship programmes in states has taken off in a tentative and haphazard manner. Although she has appointed a separate Congress general secretary, Vilas Muttemwar, to oversee the monitoring system and asked all state party units to set up committees to study the implementation of the schemes, little has been achieved in the past 10 months. Many state units are yet...