-The Telegraph New Delhi: Pre-school kids who have a better understanding of concepts like distance and shape have a higher chance of excelling in studies in later years, a new study has concluded. Rather than numbers and alphabets, the stress should be on helping children understand these concepts, a key person behind the exercise told The Telegraph. The Indian Early Childhood Impact Study assessed around 13,000 five-year-olds from Assam, Rajasthan and undivided Andhra...

-Hindustan Times Kolkata/ Darjeeling/ Guwahati: More than five lakh workers in West Bengal’s biggest labour-intensive industries of tea and jute have not got wages since Wednesday when the union government withdrew two high-denomination currency notes. A similar predicament exists in neighbouring Assam and the rest of the Northeast, which has tea estates in remote areas where currency notes will take days to arrive. In Bengal, owners of several tea gardens and jute mills...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: Last year, the invitation card was printed thrice - first with the Prime Minister's name, next without his name and finally with his name. This time, the organisers have been spared the agony of uncertainty: the card has been printed without the Prime Minister's name. Narendra Modi will be skipping the Central Information Commission's annual convention for the first time since the Right to Information Act was enacted in...

-The Hindu Business Line The spread of rural electrification has been overestimated, and the adoption of subsidised LPG has not picked up It is little more than a year since the Sustainable Development Goals were agreed to at the UN General Assembly. SDGs are a set of 17 goals that are intended to dramatically improve lives across the world by 2030. A major goal is SDG7 which aims to ensure universal access...

-The Hindu “Fundamental rights and human rights of people, however they may be placed, cannot be ignored only because of their adverse circumstances” Blaming Delhi for paying “little or no attention” to the fundamental rights of under trials and convicts, the Supreme Court said it is “not only tragic but also pathetic” to find that prisons in the national capital, along with half a dozen States across the country, are overcrowded by...