-The Indian Express Competencies and achievements of young people will need to be aligned with expectations The Right to Education Act came into force in 2010. However, the trend towards universal elementary education was well in place before that. For example, for the age group 6 to 14, enrolment levels have been high and rising for quite some time. Even as early as 2005-6, the first Annual Status of Education Report...

-TheWire.in Based on a militarised notion of ‘targeting’, such welfare policies deny citizens the right to basic services. In an incisive analysis on anti-poverty and other social security programmes, Professor Amartya Sen astutely asks why the notion of targeting, which is essentially a military concept, is so routinely invoked in analytical discourses on basic welfare rights for the people as well as in policy framing in this respect. Indeed, why would an...

-The Hindu Business Line Data from 14 major States show that economic growth has bypassed most of the poor children in the country Child health is basic to building the well-being and capabilities of the future of a growing nation. It is a great social responsibility in which the state has to play a critical role. It appears this primary responsibility is forgotten in the single-minded pursuit of economic growth. This article...

-The Hindu Business Line It should have considered universal basic income. But sadly, budgets are not seen as a means to meet socio-economic goals The Union Budget attracts considerable media hype and debate. Democracy, if understood as a contract between the state and its citizens, may have to use the budgetary process to ensure not only prosperity for all, but justice or fairness to the most disadvantaged among them as well. A rational...

-The Hindu Democracies are not sustained by obedient productive units in so-called knowledge-based economies. But that is precisely what the new National Education Policy envisages “Public policy,” according to Douglas Gomery, “is the making of governmental rules and regulations to benefit not one individual but society as a whole. It asks, what is the best way to conceive and evaluate policies aimed at the public as a whole and its various subgroups?”...