Mayavati had better do something quick about the state of schools in Uttar Pradesh if she wants children to spell her name right. An NGO assessing the District Primary Education Programme and Sarva Siksha Abhiyan, a national programme for universalisation of elementary education, asked 16 students of Classes III and IV of a government school in Joar village near Lucknow to write the name of their chief minister in Hindi. Mavit and...

The Centre plans to open over 1,000 residential schools for girls in backward and remote areas as part of its plan to universalise education. The National Sample Survey has found out that over 81 lakh children aged 6 to 13 years remain out of school and that most of them are girls. The human resource development ministry has told the finance ministry it wants to set up 1,073 new Kasturba Gandhi Balika...

The implementation of the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 has created controversy in West Bengal. The gram sabha, the basic unit in the process of forest rights recognition, has been replaced by the gram sansad, denoting the village level constituency under the panchayati raj system. This has been followed by contiguous arrangements as well as initiatives which are inconsistent with the Act....

Objective is to make the public “feel the Government and not to see it” Project cost for Coimbatore is about Rs. 2 crore Coimbatore will soon become an “e-district” with select services of four departments going online initially. Tamil Nadu E-governance Agency Director Santhosh Babu told The Hindu that Coimbatore was one of the six districts that would come under e-governance in the State soon. Revenue, Adi Dravida and Tribal Welfare, Backward Classes,...

Can more knowledge about our society, about the individuals and groups who constitute it, be a bad thing? I’ve been wondering about this lately, in the context of two government initiatives to gather more knowledge about us Indians, as caste groups and as individuals. Both of these information-gathering exercises—the proposal for a “caste census”, which has generated a stormy argument, and the merely desultory discussion over the planned Unique Identification...