With an eye to mainstreaming sustainability, rural development minister Jairam Ramesh has reached out to the United Nations Development Programme to suggest ways for 'greening' rural development schemes and programmes. "We are spending Rs 99,000 crore this year on rural development programmes and it would be a shame if we don't mainstream green objectives in these programmes. Rural development programmes offer a huge opportunity to deal with green concerns and challenges...

-The Financial Express Lots of work ahead to make RTE work The reasons behind the poor performance of schools students in India are slowly being whittled down from a whole range of reasons (low attendance, high drop-out rate, lack of teachers, lack of adequate number of schools, etc) to just a few key areas that need a lot of work. The most pressing need seems to be the paucity of TRAIned and...

There is a complicated relationship between abortion as such and the selective abortion of female foetuses. This dilemma is one with which the women’s movement in India has been grappling since the late 1980s. In my discussion of this dilemma, I would like to move away completely from Satyamev Jayate, the television programme, (on which a discussion has been initiated by Shohini Ghosh on kafila.org). In any case, there the...

-The Hindustan Times A cartoon on BR Ambedkar in a government schoolbook rocked Parliament on Friday, forcing HRD minister Kapil Sibal to apologise to the nation and order the removal of the “objectionable” caricature. The row over the cartoon — more than 60 years old — sidetracked the ongoing controversy over  the Aircel-Maxis deal, which the BJP and other Opposition parties have been using to target home minister P Chidambaram. Instead, members cutting across...

-PTI A group of persons on Saturday ransacked the office of Prof. Suhas Palshikar, who resigned as National Council Of Educational Research And TRAIning (NCERT) adviser in the wake of the row over cartoon of B.R. Ambedkar in school text books. Police said the persons involved in the incident had been invited by Prof. Palshikar for discussion in his office after they raised objections on the cartoon. They later damaged furniture in his...