In 2004, a boy was crushed to death by a vehicle when he was crossing the road in front of a school to fetch water. The school, in the heart of the nation’s capital, did not have drinking water facilities. Seven years later, courtesy the NGO Environmental and Consumer Protection Foundation and the Supreme Court, all Indian states (the last two being Uttar Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir) have given...

U.P.'s GDP grew at 7.28 per cent in the past five years, but the State ranks low in virtually every area of socio-economic development. IF statistics on gross domestic product (GDP) are the only criteria to evaluate the performance of a government, the Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) government in Uttar Pradesh will have to be rated as one with highly impressive credentials. For, India's most populous State has recorded a...

IndiaEducationDiary.in   With a number of States facing constraints in implementing the historic Right to Education (RTE) Act, various stakeholders, including academics, policy makers and education experts, will share a podium here on December 21 to deliberate on innovative policy ideas aimed at universalizing quality education for all children. The experts, coming together at a national conference, will also discuss in detail the critical issues plaguing the Indian education sector, especially for children...

The scheme seeks to add a superstructure of digital empowerment without laying an adequate foundation Until recently, S. Dhibeka, 16, who had never used a computer until she chose the computer science stream last year at the aging, leafy Kakkalur Government Higher Secondary School near Chennai, could practise programming for only an hour or two a week, often sharing a desktop computer with one or more of her classmates. But since September,...

A.K. Ramanujan, while referring to the diversity and apparently contradictory element of unity in the Indian traditions, refers to an Irish joke about whether to classify trousers as singular or plural: singular from the top, plural from the bottom.1 A Concurrent Discipline Course in the University of Delhi for Second Year Honours students not doing History was introduced in 2005 on ‘Culture in India—Ancient’, and had sought to very sensitively...