Government officials went gaga in schools over Global Handwashing Day on October 15, but the Supreme Court ruling on October 18 that directed all states to come up with permanent toilets in every cradle by December 31, 2011, has left them cold. Why? The first they knew was tokenism. The second is a Herculean task. There are no functional toilets in more than half of Jharkhand’s 40,000 government schools. The apex court bench...

Come November 11, the students at India’s 13 lakh government schools will receive a message from the Prime Minister. “Education gave me a new life,” it will say. “Education is the magic wand that can help us meet any challenge.” The written piece will be read out in the assembly at each school on that day, observed as National Education Day to commemorate the birth anniversary of India’s first education minister, Maulana...

As I have already mentioned, in this transitional age, the media should help our people move forward into the modern, scientific age. For this purpose the media should propagate rational and scientific ideas, but instead of doing so, a large section of our media propagates superstitions of various kinds. It is true that the intellectual level of the vast majority of Indians is very low — they are steeped in casteism,...

In a remote Indian village in the Western state of Maharashtra, a fourth-grader named Suraj Balu Zore proudly told IPS that he can now effortlessly operate a laptop computer. Fallen by the wayside of urban India’s information technology (IT) superhighway, Khairat village – located just 80 kilometres from booming Mumbai – still has no access to the Internet.  But thanks to the recent efforts of ‘one laptop per child’ – a project...

Rs. 72 crore fund meant to stop chronic malnutrition and hunger deaths among the state’s 90,000 Sahariya tribals unspent or used for welfare of officials Baran, Rajasthan: The consequences of careless, uncaring governance in Jaipur and Delhi-both ruled by the Congress-are proving deadly to India’s poorest tribals and providing a warning to the dangers inherent in India’s upcoming multi-billion dollar social-security scheme. At a time when the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA)...