-The Telegraph   Meals daily, so will be the “feedback”. Come June, the principals and headmasters of 12 lakh government primary schools in the country will have to inform the Centre on a daily basis through their mobile phones whether they have served mid-day meals. The HRD ministry will start an Interactive Voice Response System (IVRS) under which the headmasters and principals will get messages or calls on their mobiles. “The cellphones of the principals...

A school teacher in the tribal Betul district of Madhya Pradesh asked students to fetch liquor for him and then caned the girls, forcing them to dance in a closed classroom on Republic Day. The teacher, Mahesh Malviya, has been suspended and an inquiry ordered against him. This shocking incident came to light when 30 School children from Deochowki village in Betul and their parents reached the district collector's office on...

School girls in bright red uniforms troop down the slope in groups of threes and fours in Koppa, the fertile sugarcane town in southern Karnataka’s agricultural district of Mandya. A teenage boy on a motorcycle does the dim-and-dip with his headlights, the equivalent of a wink, as he passes the girls on his way up the slope in what seems to be a strut on a motorcycle. “Television and mobile phones...

The tribals in the Maoist-affected districts, including Mirzapur, Chandauli and Sonbhadra of East Uttar Pradesh, seem to have been born with a burden -- poverty. With almost all the major political parties promising special packages for various regions of the state to garner votes, the situation for those living below poverty line in the region is as desperate as was a couple of decades back. Take for example Katwaru, a member...

Civil rights groups blame packaged food supplied to anganwadis  Close on the heels of the damning hunger and malnutrition (HUNGaMA) report, which found 42 per cent children below age five across India underweight and 59 per cent children stunted,  comes another report on the state of nutrition among children in Karnataka state. Over 1.2 million children in the state in the age group of 0-6 years are malnourished and underweight, says a...