-IANS There were only 12 days of work per household in West Bengal under the rural jobs scheme MGNREGA as against the national average of 28 days, say NGOs who blame organisational inefficiency and faulty implementation for the situation in the state. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) assures 100 days of work for one member of every rural household in a year. But West Bengal's performance has...

In a remote Indian village in the Western state of Maharashtra, a fourth-grader named Suraj Balu Zore proudly told IPS that he can now effortlessly operate a laptop computer. Fallen by the wayside of urban India’s information technology (IT) superhighway, Khairat village – located just 80 kilometres from booming Mumbai – still has no access to the Internet.  But thanks to the recent efforts of ‘one laptop per child’ – a project...

-The Hindu   Congress taunts its coalition partner, asks it to first take care of its existing portfolios Sparring over portfolios between the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party in Maharashtra has begun anew after Union Minister Jairam Ramesh's suggestion that the Rural Development Department implement the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS). While the NCP is happy about the suggestion, the Congress — which holds the Water Conservation and Employment Guarantee...

-The Economic Times   As the government gears up for a year-long campaign to spread awareness about the Right to Education, a report on teaching and learning in rural India finds that progress in learning ability of students has not been commensurate to the massive investment in primary education and increase in enrolment. The study conducted by the ASER Centre, a network of civil society organisations led by Pratham, in collaboration with...

Primary education was made compulsory through a central Act a year and a half earlier, but that’s done little to raise the quality of teaching or learning in schools. Several students of class III were not able to read texts of class I, teachers were missing from classrooms, and the government derives achievement from enrolment without factoring in attendance, found a report published by non-profit body Pratham with support from UNESCO...