-The Hindu Business Line Government surveys on out-of-school children are gross underestimations. The Census numbers, however, are a shocker Census 2011 showed that about 32 million children aged between 6 and 13 years have never attended any educational institution, even though government estimates of out-of-school children show substantially lower numbers. Given that out-of-school numbers consist of both children who dropped out and those who never attended school, it raises some questions over...

-Frontline In Rajasthan, the abysmal state of school education has forced pupils, particularly girls, to come out in protest against the shortage of teachers and lack of infrastructure. IT was just over a year ago, on Gandhi Jayanti 2014, that girls of the senior secondary school of the town of Bhim in Rajasthan went on strike. The young, fresh-faced and neatly groomed girls were far removed from anyone’s idea of potentially rowdy...

-Reuters NEW DELHI: Government's main program to fight child malnutrition has been hit by budget cuts that make it difficult to pay wages of millions of health workers, cabinet minister Maneka Gandhi said on Monday in a rare public criticism of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's policies. The government in February slashed social sector budgets to boost infrastructure spending in a bid to fasten the pace of economic recovery. States were asked to...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: The ministry of women and child development on Monday strongly refuted a Reuters report which attributed certain comments to Union minister Maneka Gandhi on the impact of cuts in budgetary allocation. The ministry issued a clarification and said the interpretation of the interview and certain comments attributed to the minister in the report are completely incorrect. Here's the full text of the clarification issued by the ministry: Reuters,...

-Down to Earth In the run up to World Food Day on October 16, a Food and Agriculture Organization report focuses on the role of social protection in breaking the cycle of rural poverty The Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) annual report on the State of Food and Agriculture (SOFA) 2015 explores the potential of social protection programmes in developing countries to tackle hunger and poverty. What is social protection? Social protection programmes...