-The Week Shambhu Kumar, 8, quite liked his job as a domestic help in a small town in Assam. He had to mind two children nearly his age, keep an eye on the ducks and be available for chores all day. It wasn't too hard, and he was well fed, too, though he missed his grandmother, a tea garden labourer. One day, some women from the state education department came to the...

-Deccan Chronicle Raghu Kanchustambham graduated from IIT-Guwahati in 2000 with the intention of making the best use of his world-class education. Little did he know that a chance accident was going to point him in an opposite direction, one that was destined to bring this Hyderabadi worldwide acclaim. Currently, he is preparing to fly to Oslo, Norway, in October to participate in the two-day Digital Winners conference. Raghu will compete in ‘The...

-The Indian Express Year after year, Pratham's Annual Survey of Education Report, or ASER, tells us about children who go to school but can't read or do basic math. This year, as ASER volunteers fan out across 570 rural districts, Uma Vishnu visits a village in Rampur, a district in UP with some of the worst learning levels in the country, to see what it is to read. Aao, padho." Kusum,...

-The Hindu More than half the households in the country still lack access to sanitation. In its villages, some toilets built under past schemes exist only on paper. In 2019, India will observe the 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, who gave the clarion call, "Clean up your own mess." But even 67 years after Independence, our cities and towns present a sorry picture replete with mounds of garbage, rotting sewers and...

-Tehelka Despite the serious toll it takes on women's health, female sterilisation remains the most prevalent form of contraception in India. While memories of the 21 months of Emergency in 1975-77, imposed by the then prime minister Indira Gandhi, survives even today in the minds of Indian men as the fear of forced sterilisation, the country's population control policies have shifted over the years since then to target the politically less...