-Frontline.in An initiative focussed on Kerala’s development experience exposes a worrying trend of rising inequality and proposes a strategy for sustainable and equitable growth. THE fourth international Congress on Kerala Studies, organised by the A.K.G. Centre for Study and Research in Thiruvananthapuram on January 9-10, has generated much interest for its focus on a worrying new trend in Kerala’s development experience: rising inequality and marginalisation of large sections of people despite...

A.K. Ramanujan, while referring to the diversity and apparently contradictory element of unity in the Indian traditions, refers to an Irish joke about whether to classify trousers as singular or plural: singular from the top, plural from the bottom.1 A Concurrent Discipline Course in the University of Delhi for Second Year Honours students not doing History was introduced in 2005 on ‘Culture in India—Ancient’, and had sought to very sensitively...

The state must ensure that individual freedoms not only exist, but that everyone has the ability to experience them The ongoing theories of justice in mainstream political philosophy are very strongly dependent today on a way of thinking largely initiated by Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century, with an overwhelming concentration on a hypothetical “social contract” that the people of a sovereign state can be imagined to have endorsed. This presumed...

KEY TRENDS   • In 2017-18, 24.8 percent of rural working-age men and 74.5 percent of rural working-age (viz. 15-59 years) women were not employed. In urban areas, 25.8 percent of working-age men and 80.2 percent of working-age women were not employed AB   • Both the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) and the Consumer Pyramids Survey of the Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy (CMIE-CPDX) report the overall unemployment rate to be around 6 per cent in 2018,...

KEY TRENDS   • At the national level, the proportion of government schools having facilities like drinking water was 96.39 percent, boys' toilet was 94.64 percent, girls' toilet was 97.03 percent, boundary wall was 60.12 percent, playground was 56.98 percent, ramp was 71.50 percent, CWSN toilet was 19.59 percent, electricity was 56.45 percent and library was 79.36 percent, according to the Unified District Information System For Education (UDISE) 2017-18 (Provisional) *12   • ASER 2019 ‘Early Years’ data shows a clear...