-The Hindustan Times Democracy is in peril in West Bengal, Partha Sarothi Ray alleged within hours of walking free from jail on Wednesday, after a number of intellectuals, including Noam Chomsky urged Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for his release. Ray was arrested on April 8 for participating in a sit-in demonstration protesting the eviction of about 200 families from Nonadanga by the Mamata Banerjee administration. He was granted bail on Wednesday, after...

The ICDS' plight is symptomatic of the problems plaguing the Union government's flagship schemes for the poor all over the country.   INDIA may be the only country in the world where we describe the ensuring of the basic socio-economic rights of the people in terms of “flagship schemes” that are seen as the benevolent contribution of governments. One problem with this approach is that the delivery of basic services is...

-Economic and Political Weekly Two years after the Right to Education Act, the government needs to focus on quality. Two years is perhaps too short a period in which to assess how effective the groundbreaking Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act 2009 (RTE), which came into effect on 1 April 2010, has been in raising standards of education in a country as diverse as India. The very fact that...

-Rediff.com    In this ongoing series we bring you 30 stories of struggle, survival and success to inspire you. This son of a rickshaw puller, who graduated in Mathematics chose entirely new subjects in Civils because he could not afford coaching. Here is his story On the pot-holed lanes of India's holy city Varanasi, Narayan Jaiswal used to pedal his rickety rickshaw to make a living and send his children to school in nearby...

-Live Mint At a time when India plans a multi-pronged attack on malnutrition in 200 high-burden districts, it will pay to examine the cracks in state institutions that have led to past failures and can still derail well-intentioned plans. Melghat, a tribal corner in the northeastern fringes of India’s richest state—Maharashtra—is an apt example of almost everything that has gone wrong in India’s response to malnutrition and child deaths. Every 14th child dies...