-The Times of India REHUA LALGANJ (Pratapgarh): It was not just straitened financial circumstances but also the villagers' casteist mindset that the Saroj brothers fought along their way to achieving their IIT dream. Caste biases run so deep here that even as they returned home feted by chief minister Akhilesh Yadav on Sunday, stones were thrown at their house. "There were five or six stones thrown at our home. We informed the...
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Varun Gauri, Senior Economist, Development Research Group at the World Bank, interviewed by Anjuli Bhargava
-Business Standard The World Bank's latest report "Mind, Society and Behaviour" calls for re-designing development policy based on a more realistic understanding of how human beings think and behave. The lead author of the report, Varun Gauri, was in New Delhi and spoke to Anjuli Bhargava on the thinking behind the report and what India can do with it. Edited excerpts: * Right from the cover design to the title, this report...
More »The Importance of Being 'Rurban': Tracking Changes in a Traditional Setting -Dipankar Gupta
-Economic and Political Weekly A categorical distinction is facing rough weather--that between urban and rural. If we take just agriculture, there is so much of the outside world that comes in not just as external markets but as external inputs. Further, many of our villages barely qualify as rural if we were to take occupation alone. So the earlier line that separated the farmer from the worker in towns is slowly...
More »Unfinished work of equality -Govardhan Wankhede
-The Indian Express To improve the educational status of Scheduled Castes, a fresh understanding of their achievements and challenges is necessary. The concern of scholars, planners and policymakers has been to achieve the goals set in our Constitution: equality, justice and equal opportunity for all. However, in the period after Independence, it was revealed that education was not necessarily linked to social and economic development and the majority of Indians continued...
More »Is the MGNREGA being set up for failure? -G Sampath & Rukmini S
-The Hindu The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employee Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGA) has generated more rural employment than any other government scheme or private initiative in the history of independent India. At the same time, it has also generated a great deal of controversy over its merits and demerits. It would be fair to say that the policy establishment in the country right now is not favourably disposed towards the MGNREGA, with the...
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