-The Times of India Patna: The midday meal (MDM) scheme has come a long way since November 2001 when the Supreme Court (in PUCL vs Union of India and others case) ordered all state governments to provide cooked midday meal to children in primary schools. Though it took Bihar nearly five years to put the midday meal programme, 61 per cent parents were satisfied with the quality of food served, according...

-The Hindu Considering Nobel laureate Amartya Sen's caution regarding the insecurity that people face over a lifetime due to the deprivation of basic education, the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2014 calls for a hard look at the situation. Its findings amount to a distressing catalogue of the failures inherent in the pedagogic methods of instruction in vogue. The foremost among them is the overemphasis on a curriculum that...

-Down to Earth The primary health centre (PHC) at Ajara block in Maharashtra's Kolhapur district would handle just eight childbirth cases a year till 2011. Today, it handles over 125 such cases in a year. The health centre became efficient because of a Central government scheme that empowers communities to monitor public health services. In 2010, the residents participated in a jan sunwai (public hearing) session, in which they told senior...

-Economic and Political Weekly The key to improving the quality of healthcare services in India and reducing costs at the same time can be found by enacting legislation which lays down minimum standards of patient care. In the absence of such standards and the reluctance of health insurance companies to standardise either price or quality, healthcare services continue to be expensive and of doubtful quality. Developing standards of patient care by...

-The Indian Express The first nine months of the new BJP government has only underscored its anti-poor, anti-rural image. The substantive and substantial changes in rural development have been restrictive in nature. The new government has worked to undermine the legal and financial framework of MGNREGA, substantially weakened the provisions of the land acquisition act through an ordinance and, through year-end budget cuts, they have undermined almost every social sector programme, reportedly...