-Down to Earth Thousands of people working under NREGS bring a 38 km stream back from the dead in Uttar Pradesh Thirty nine-year-old Ram Ishwar gave up farming to pull a rickshaw outside the railway station in Uttar Pradesh's Fatehpur town. He says scarcity of water and a resultant increase in the cost of irrigation rendered farming unprofitable. Wheat production from his 0.4 hectare (ha) farmland shrank from one tonne to half...

-The Hindu India's long-standing legacies of caste, gender and class antagonism replicate on campuses as well. As higher education moves forward, it does so on these social cleavages The brutal sexual attack on a young woman in Delhi, in 2012, and a savage attack on a girl student of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) on its campus this year are just two examples of extreme violence that have shocked the nation. Acts of...

The Times of India NEW DELHI: The fact that inflation has been an area of concern for some years now is well known, but exactly what goods and services have seen prices rise most sharply? School fees, a CSO study shows, have seen the most dramatic spike over the tenure of the UPA, up 433% between March 2004 and March 2013. The chart topper is quite ironic given the much-talked about Right...

-The Hindu     Insufficient number of classrooms, unusable toilets, no playground Chennai: Fifty-three percent of Adi Dravidar Schools are functioning without sufficient number of classrooms in the northern districts of Tamil Nadu, according to a recent study conducted by Samakalvi Iyakkam, a movement for child rights. The Samakalvi Iyakkam-Tamilnadu conducted the study on 90 Adi Dravidar Welfare Schools in Chennai, Tiruvallur, Kancheepuram, Vellore, Tiruvannamalai and Vilupuram districts. In several places, as the boundaries were...

-The Business Standard Intrastate inequality can only be corrected through reform of budgetary allocation formulae between districts within states The hoopla surrounding election results in India is reminiscent of nothing so much as a horse race ("...and X romps home the winner!"). The difference is that for the horse and its handlers, the work is done when the race is over. For the winners in the recent round of state elections,...