-Economic and Political Weekly   The Reliance/Network18 deal should make us wake up to the impending threat to Media plurality. Few are discussing it. India has just seen one of the biggest Media deals, where the country’s leading industrial and business giant has bought into the largest network of news and current affairs TV channels. Yet, the fact that this could mark the beginning of a trend leading to private Media being controlled...

What was our imMediate response to further decline in the child sex ratio in India? Within days of the provisional 2011 Census results (March-April 2011), the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare reconstituted the Central Supervisory Board for the Pre-conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (Prohibition of Sex selection) Act 1994 , which had not met for 3 years, and on November 30, 2011 the Ministry of Women and Child Development...

-PTI Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's office made its debut on popular microblogging site Twitter on Monday. The new Media foray by the PMO comes in the wake of TV journalist Pankaj Pachauri taking over as Communications Adviser to the Prime Minister. "The Prime Minister's work should be in the public domain so that people know that the government is functioning for their benefit," PMO sources said. The Twitter account of the PMO...

-The Indian Express   More than a quarter of children between the age group of 10 and 12 years cannot add two small sums of money without using a calculator, a new study has revealed. The research indicated that youngsters are leaving primary school unable to spell, add or do times tables and their parents do not have the time to help them. Around a third cannot do division or basic algebra while half...

How our dismal education scene is linked to our intolerance What’s common to the Salman Rushdie episode, India’s dismal educational scenario—as underlined by the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and Pratham’s 7th Annual Survey of Education Report (ASER)—and its appalling ranking on the Global Hunger Index (GHI)? It’s clear even on the surface: a deep disconnect between India’s claims on democratic superpower status and its grim reality. If you probe...