In the good old days, there were the Asian Games under Indira Gandhi. Inaugurated by the Empress on her own birthday, November 19, 1982, they seem like a fairy tale now. No leaking roofs weeks before the show; no front-page shockers about crores paid to shady firms; everything going like clockwork under Her Majesty’s eagle eye. Definitely no portly, shifty-eyed Suresh Kalmadi. At that time, there was no Organising Committee. Under...

Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) is world’s most extensive primary education programme, but is it working? The grim reality that India’s Right to Education is at best working in terms of quantity of schools, and certainly not in terms of quality of education, was first proved in successive Annual Status of Education Reports (ASER), brought out by education NGO ‘Pratham’ through nationwide ground-level surveys. Now a Planning Commission evaluation report confirms most...

Amipur may be a small dot along the national highway from Patna to Nawada, but its ambitions are big. In the 50-odd households in the village, sparsely populated and rife with an uneasy quiet, most men have left for work outside Bihar. Siyaram Chauhan is the one who returned. He was rescued last month by the state government officials from a brick kiln in Uttar Pradesh’s Bahraich where he worked as...

Dalit women lead unhygienic lives for wages of Rs.15 a month  Caste hierarchy prevents women from doing any other job The Railways and municipalities are the biggest employers Each morning a group of Dalit women step outside their homes to “fulfil their social role” of cleaning dry latrines with their brooms and bare hands. They then carry human excrement in pots and baskets on their heads. Braving the worst possible form of caste...

For nearly three decades, Selvi V. has lived in a village in the Kanchipuram district of Tamil Nadu, 75km from Chennai, without a toilet. And there really wasn’t any need felt to have one in this family of daily wage farm labourers. Selvi and her now-married daughter would wake up either early every morning or wait until dark to relieve themselves in a thicket of thorny shrubs a little distance...