Herding cattle and weaving carpets, on city waste-heaps, at traffic lights, in roadside eateries, in farms and in factories, in brick kilns and coal mines, in brothels and in our homes, children of the poor work at an age when our own are in school or at play. What is remarkable is not just our collective acceptance of such diverging destinies of children merely because of the accident of where they...

The National Mission to improve the delivery of justice is at work. In October 2009, on the basis of a Vision Document adopted at a judicial conference in New Delhi, the Government of India approved in principle a National Mission to reduce pendency and delays in the judicial system and enhance accountability through structural changes, higher performance standards and capacity-building. Many past attempts to achieve the goals did not yield results...

Sonia Gandhi’s ambitious plan to institutionalise political monitoring of the government’s flagship programmes in states has taken off in a tentative and haphazard manner. Although she has appointed a separate Congress general secretary, Vilas Muttemwar, to oversee the monitoring system and asked all state party units to set up committees to study the implementation of the schemes, little has been achieved in the past 10 months. Many state units are yet...

-The United Nations   The global demand for secondary education has risen exponentially, says a new United Nations report, which adds that governments, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, are having a hard time keeping up and many children are being left out. The 2011 Global Education Digest, released today by the Institute for Statistics of the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), says there are only enough seats for 36 per cent of...

The pointlessness of the debate over Indian measures of poverty becomes clear when we look at the country’s human development record. If per capita real incomes have risen so well during the last two decades since reforms were introduced, surely that should mean better lives for most Indians. Forget about catching up with China, there is increasing evidence of India falling behind Bangladesh in terms of key human development indicators...