-Hindustan Times New Delhi: Almost a quarter of India’s 370,000 beggars are Muslims, newly released data from the 2011 Census show, reinforcing that the community still lags behind on most counts despite the country’s rapid economic growth. Muslims, the largest minority who make up 14.2% of India’s 1.25-billion population, come out pretty much at the bottom of most socio-economic indices, even a decade after a high-level government probe into their historical disadvantages...

-Down to Earth Severe dry spells in Indian forests have hit the livelihood of more than 100 million people. But India simply does not acknowledge this drought For more than five months, residents of Jabarra village have been foraging the forests for minor forest produce (MFP). The forest in Chhattisgarh’s Dhamtari district is abundant with more than 200 types of forest produce and the district is known as Asia’s biggest trading...

The education level among the disabled stands far below that of the general population. Latest data from the Census 2011 confirms this. It shows that only 54.5 percent of the disabled aged seven years or above could read and write with understanding. (Please see table 1). As per the Census 2011, the population of disabled in the country is 2.68 crore, out of which about 1.22 crore are illiterate and 1.46...

-TheWire.in The number of people needing technical and vocational education is at least 20 million per year, but the system is barely churning out 5 million per year. In India until the middle of the 2000’s, employers were hardly interested in training within their own enterprises, let alone the system outside their enterprises. However, rapid GDP growth during those years led to a serious shortage of skilled staff. The government of India...

-TheWire.in The right to information and to education give the government the mandate to make policies that guarantee the delivery of educational resources to all. But the Copyright Act needs to be amended to strengthen fair use exceptions for educational purposes. Last August, the University of Maryland University College made an announcement that it had replaced its undergraduate textbooks with open educational resources (OER), thereby becoming the first university in the world...