The United Nations has launched a worldwide campaign to enhance the safety of 1 million schools and hospitals, where poor construction, an absence of safety drills and lack of emergency equipment can lead to the highest death tolls during earthquakes and other disasters. “Making sure that schools, hospitals and other key public infrastructure meet certain safety standards are key steps to ensure that natural hazards do not turn into disasters,” Secretary-General...

Last summer, about 150 families of Kachan village in Jharkhand’s Palamu district decided to pool funds to repair their only community tube well. A drought, the worst in many years, had dried up two ponds; there were no wells around; and the tube well had been dysfunctional for a year. It took a lot of hardship and one whole month for them to put together what the mechanic had asked...

Three United Nations agencies are hailing what they described as a “ground-breaking” new act that legalizes the right to free and compulsory education for all children between the ages of 6 and 14 in India. The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimates there are eight million children in this age group, mostly girls, who are out-of-school in India. “Tens of millions of children will benefit from this initiative ensuring quality education with equity,”...

Even as the Right to Education Act comes into force in the country yesterday, the Mid-day meal scheme, an ambitious scheme of the previous Congress-led regime under PV Narsimha Rao, has failed to attract children to government schools in the state. Recently Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot admitted that 10 lakh children had dropped out of government schools in the state in the last five years. Official figures from the Rural...

Even as the Right to Education came into effect on Thursday, the countdown began for lakhs of unrecognised schools across the country against whom action can be taken under the new law unless they get themselves regularized within the next three years. The task of enforcing this regularization will be humungous if studies indicating the proliferation of unrecognized schools are to be believed. In 2005, in a survey in seven...