Street children collecting garbage scattered on roads near Sunderpur-Bazardiha area. The schoolchildren in the area celebrating Saraswati Puja on Tuesday. The two pictures in contrast reveal the sorry state of affairs when it comes to education for the underprivileged kids. The provisions of the Right to Education (RTE) Act, which came into force on April 1, 2010, call for free and compulsory education to children between 6 to 14 years...

The government has a plan to reach welfare to the poor without wasting money. It wants to put hard cash in their hands instead of spending on welfare programmes. To begin with, it wants to end the public distribution system of food grain and give money directly to the people. Its logic: the new system of cash transfer will plug leakages and save an enormous amount of money. But is it...

South Asian countries, led by India, registered a rapid economic growth in 2010 and their unemployment rates dipped marginally from the previous year, says the latest annual Global Employment Trends (GET) report of the International Labour Organisation (ILO). Globally, however, it was a bad year for jobs for the third successive year. The annual employment trends survey points to a highly differentiated recovery in labour markets, with persistently high levels of...

NGOs To No Go’s     * NGOs have mushroomed; so have instances of misappropriation of funds     * Not disclosing expenditure and receipts; nor revealing who funds them     * Not setting up NGO for the task it was funded for     * Flocking to 'hot' topics, inviting accusations of singing to industrialists’ tunes     * For every NGO supporting a cause, another springs up against that cause *** NGO numbers     * 3.3 million Number of NGOs...

The countrywide share of corporate retail in food distribution tripled in the past four years when retail food prices showed the greatest increase. THE dramatic increase in food inflation over the past two years has been associated with several surprises. One major surprise has been how the top economic policymakers in the country have responded to it. The initial response was one of apparent disbelief, followed very quickly by the...