-The Hindu Delay by States in specifying fresh criteria and completing verification More than a year after the National Food Security Act (NFSA) was passed, beneficiaries are yet to be identified as States have delayed specifying fresh criteria and completing verification. Even the Socio-Economic Caste Census (SECC), which was proposed in 2011 as a comprehensive survey to identify socio-economic characteristics of the poor and to be used to identify NFSA beneficiaries, is...

-Al Jazeera More than 100 workers have died of starvation since West Bengal's tea estates have begun shutting down. Jalpaiguri/Alipurduar, India - The picturesque tea gardens carpeting West Bengal's Dooars region are gradually turning into graveyards, as dozens of workers have fallen victim to starvation in recent months. More than 100 tea-garden workers have died of starvation in the past year amid site closures, activists say - but rather than taking action, the...

-The Indian Express More than four years after the RTE was passed, the state has no handle on the numbers of out-of-school children. The recently released report of the Global Initiative on Out-of-School Children, based on a situational analysis of India, opens a Pandora's box on data and methodological issues that plague the estimation of out-of-school children in India. As the report reveals, there is a multiplicity of definitions, sources of data...

-The Times of India Mitu Kumari, in charge of a government school in Patahin, a village on the outskirts of Muzaffarpur, Bihar, has a measured enthusiasm for Prime Minister Narendra Modi's announcement that toilets for girls will be built in schools that still don't have this basic facility. For her 146 students and three women teachers, absence of toilets is an intolerable problem. "I have written to everybody, from the village mukhia...

-Economic and Political Weekly India faces an exponential growth in the proportion of its elderly in the near future, but there is no specific policy of substance to deal with the many ramifications of this development. What little exists hardly does justice to the country's elderly poor, who are forced to contend with daunting challenges late in life when they have few resources and are partially or entirely dependent on others....