-Economic and Political Weekly     This paper presents results from a larger household-, school-, and institutional-level study on the role of the private sector and the early phase of implementation of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009. While some of the controversies about the RTE Act were reported in the media and publicly discussed, this paper reports data from semi-structured interviews with key education officials and implementers,...

-The Times of India   CHENNAI: When traditional methods of using chemical pesticides, fogging and releasing Gambusia fish into water bodies fail to do enough to control mosquito menace, a little out-of-the-box thinking is required. Digital interventions are beginning to take over to help grapple with vector-borne diseases. The city corporation's health department is working on an app to monitor the fieldwork of 5,000 workers who visit households to eliminate mosquito breeding...

-Human Rights Watch New Delhi: School authorities in India persistently discriminate against children from marginalized communities, denying them their right to education, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. Four years after an ambitious education law went into effect in India guaranteeing free schooling to every child ages 6 to 14, almost every child is enrolled, yet nearly half are likely to drop out before completing their elementary education. The...

-The Times of India   NEW DELHI: Giving an important clarification on live-in relationships, the Supreme Court has said that if a man and woman "lived like husband and wife" for a long period and had children, the judiciary would presume that the two were married. A bench of Justices B S Chauhan and J Chelameswar on Monday issued the clarification on a petition filed by advocate Uday Gupta, who had questioned...

-The Times of India   NEW DELHI: "The teacher tells us to sit on the other side," said "Pankaj," an eight-year-old tribal boy from Uttar Pradesh, "If we sit with others, she scolds us and asks us to sit separately. The teacher doesn't sit with us because she says we are dirty." "The teacher didn't let us go to the toilet. One day, I asked her for permission to go to the...