-Outlook Labour is bought cheap, treated cheap-in India's garment factories as at Bangladeshi ones Even as the world remains morbidly fixated on the tragedy in Rana Plaza on the outskirts of Dhaka-the collapse of the textiles sweatshop three weeks ago buried 1,127 workers and sparked off a global outrage-it is business as usual at India's textile hubs. And you don't have to travel far from the city centre to...

-The Economic Times Arvind Panagariya, a professor of Indian economics at Columbia University, hits out at Nobel laureate and Harvard University professor Amartya Sen over his call to confront MPs with the "number of deaths" a delayed Food Security Bill can cause. The former chief economist at the Asian Development Bank counters Sen's argument that it is high social spending that has contributed to the economic growth of Asian economies such...

-Countercurrents.org   The events of last over two decades have shown us, more than before that the efforts of dividing the nation by communal forces have been a major obstacle to social peace and process of development. In India while the communal violence began with the Jabalpur riot of 1961, it is from last couple of decades especially from 1980s that the divisive politics has tried to drive a wedge between different...

-The Hindu Students in government schools in Assam study only for two-and-a-half hours every day at the primary level compared to five-and-a-half to six-and-a-half hours in the rest of the country, an official study has shown. Similarly, the total number of working days in primary schools each year is 180 in Nagaland and Manipur and a maximum of 253 in Bihar and Jharkhand with lower than average literacy rates. But in most...

-The Indian Express     Chandigarh: To meet the long-pending demand of private schools, the UT Education Department has finally initiated the process of reimbursing the bills submitted by private schools regarding the expenditure incurred on the economic weaker section (EWS) students and disadvantaged groups admitted under the RTE Act for the past three years. To verify the bills, the department has asked the schools to submit documents containing information regarding the number of...