-The Times of India Two sturdy, grey Metro pillars near the Yamuna Bank station are covered with graffiti of a different kind. The walls under the bridge have alphabets scribbled over them and the place echoes with the murmur of children reciting poems as if trying to compete with the rattling of the metro. This is where Rajesh Kumar Sharma, a shop owner, spends his mornings, teaching the 3Rs and more...

-Hindustan Times New Delhi: Nine-year-old Priyanka Kumari wants to escape her impoverished childhood but the school she studies in is most unusual – underneath a metro bridge in east Delhi’s Shakarpur area. The pillars serve as the boundary of the school and trains roar past on the bridge above, rattling her as she solves elementary mathematical problems. “The teaching here is good, I like coming to this school. Sir gives work to do...

-BBC Good health data is rare in India. The last time the country published a comprehensive, state-wide survey was back in 2007. So why hasn't a vast survey of women and children carried out by the Indian government with the UN agency for children, Unicef, been released? India's so-called Rapid Survey of Children was a huge undertaking. Almost 100,000 children were measured and weighed and more than 200,000 people interviewed across the country's...

Is the Government stepping back from its responsibility under the National Food Security Act (NFSA) by giving technical reasons? Civil society organizations, which struggled to enact the Right to Food legislation, doubt that this may be the case. It has been alleged recently by several civil society activists that the Government is rolling back the Antyodaya Anna Yojana (AAY), which is meant for food security of the extremely poor households,...

-India Today Experts claim that afforestation in the degraded areas include monoculture plantations which is not sufficient to create the ecosystem required for wildlife to thrive. Union environment minister may have a plan to regenerate the degraded forests of the country but that MIGht not revive the lost wildlife and biodiversity because artificial ecosystem cannot be a substitute for the natural process. Forest experts have claimed that massive afforestation in the degraded...