-Frontline In Rajasthan, the abysmal state of school education has forced pupils, particularly girls, to come out in protest against the shortage of teachers and lack of infrastructure. IT was just over a year ago, on Gandhi Jayanti 2014, that girls of the senior secondary school of the town of Bhim in Rajasthan went on strike. The young, fresh-faced and neatly groomed girls were far removed from anyone’s idea of potentially rowdy...

-The Hindu The AP government should keep the MoUs (with investors) in the public domain. Let there be a debate on the MoUs -- Jayati Ghosh, economist VIJAYAWADA: Noted economist Jayati Ghosh does not agree that civil society has been indifferent to the problems presented to farmers due to the land acquisition tactics adopted by the State Government in gathering land for its capital city project. The academic, who headed a commission that investigated...

-Macroscan.com The Socio Economic and Caste Census provides more comprehensive household listings, but the method of determining the poor that has been adopted in the Census is deeply flawed. Please click here to read the entire article. This article was originally published in the Frontline, Print edition: August 21, 2015. ...

-Hindustan Times While searching for updates on the United Nations Third International Conference on Financing for Development, which took place in Addis Ababa recently, I came across an interesting piece of news: Music maestro AR Rahman and Bollywood superstar Hrithik Roshan would join a seven-day global campaign to popularise the sustainable development goals (SDGs), which are a new set of universal goals, targets and indicators that 193 UN member states will...

-Economic and Political Weekly Direct benefi t transfers in the form of cash cannot replace the supply of food through the public distribution system. Though it is claimed otherwise, DBT does not address the problems of identifying the poor ("targeting") and DBT in place of the PDS will expose the vulnerable to additional price fluctuation. Further, if the PDS is dismantled, there will also be no need or incentive for procurement...