The only economic or social variable that has not moved since 1991 in India is our 93% informal employment in the informal sector. So, while we have smartly and substantially moved the needle on everything from foreign exchange reserves, infant mortality, school enrolment, market capitalisation, foreign investment, and pregnancy deaths, 9 out of 10 of our workers do not work in organised employment. Informal employment—what President Alan Garcia of Peru...

India’s government is preparing to conduct the country’s first comprehensive survey on higher education, according to a senior education official. While there are reliable statistics about primary and secondary schools, currently available numbers for higher education are severely inadequate, said Sunil Kumar, additional secretary for higher education at the Ministry of Human Resource Development. Addressing a conference organized by the Confederation of Indian Industry late last month, he said the survey would map...

The economy shows consistent signs of growth. The challenge in the new year is to make development more equitable and broad-based… 2010 was a year of relief that soon grew into despondency. We were relieved that India had pulled out of the deepest post-War recession relatively unscathed. The soundness of its cautious macro-economic management was underlined once again and the US economy is also looking like getting slowly back on...

The directorate of education (DoE) has already framed the draft rules for the implementation of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009, in Goa and has forwarded the rules to the state government for its vetting by the law department. Sources in the DoE said that the draft rules, once finalized, will then be forwarded to the state government for its approval and for the...

How many spelling mistakes can you expect in a school textbook supposedly prepared by a body of experts and released to the students after several rounds of revision? If you go through a computer textbook, provided under the Rajiv Gandhi Computer Literacy Programme and being read by thousands of students in the government schools of Assam, you will find an average of six to 12 mistakes on a page. These books, written...