Competing for praise and popularity is as common between Ministries as are turf wars. When officers from different Ministries get the rare opportunity to meet and discuss matters of shared concern, they behave like alert soldiers who are expected to fight for every inch of territory. I had an exposure to this phenomenon while working for a Planning Commission sub-committee on vocational education for skill development. Vocational and technical training...

Bihar has a refreshing new motif: girls in uniform on shiny new cycles, confident and assured, simply because they go to school. A little over three years ago, the Bihar government launched the Mukhyamantri Balika Cycle Yojana—the chief minister’s cycle scheme for girls. The plan entitled girls in class IX and X to a free cycle from the state or Rs2,000 to buy one—mirroring a scheme started by Tamil Nadu, but...

Four months after the Right to Education (RTE) Act came into force, guaranteeing every child up to 14 years of age free and compulsory education, the Delhi High Court on Thursday delivered its first landmark ruling by according the relief to 874 children, 350 of them differently abled. Justice Rajiv Sahai Endlaw allowed the petition of advocate Ashok Aggarwal of NGO Social Jurist and directed the Delhi government and its schools...

In an upstairs classroom at a residential school in Mal, near Lucknow, the girls are revising for their exams. As the light starts to fade at the glassless windows, each girl takes a brightly coloured plastic lamp and carries it to her space on the floor. There is no electricity, but the lamps are solar powered. They have been donated jointly by Swedish company Ikea and the United Nations Children’s...

School feeding programmes, which provide meals so that millions of children in poor countries can attend classes, can be broadened to reach even more pupils with the help of donors and partnerships, the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) said today as it called for increased international support. Nancy Walters, the chief of school feeding policy at WFP, told a New York forum on hunger that the programmes have many...