In the remote Raghopur block of Vaishali district in Bihar, the primary health centre (PHC) is supposed to be operational 24X7, with the medical officer in charge (MOIC) running the out-patient department between 8am and 12.30pm. On 8 May, the MOIC reached the PHC at 10.30am and left after an hour. According to patients, this was not a random event. Most of the 20-strong crowd awaiting medical attention is turned away....

Over 9000 child labourers throughout 11 district headquarters of Nagaland work in various sectors for about 16 hours a day without proper accommodation, food and education. According to a survey conducted by the Nagaland government’s Labour Department, the report was revealed by Joint Labour Commissioner of Nagaland Er Nungshiyanger Aier during a programme held at Dimapur to mark the ‘World Day against Child Labour’ yesterday. He greeted the youth Volunteers for taking...

While the landmark Right to Education Act takes the promise of primary education to more than eight million children, there are still many lacunae on the ground. But, as the Shiksha Adhikar Yatra, conducted by Dalit organisations in UP and Rajasthan showed, citizens now have the tools to demand and receive effective governance.  The landmark right to information act has made a huge impact at the local level on the...

India is setting up a $150-million corpus using funds from the World Bank, European Union and the UK government’s Department for International Development to hatch innovative strategies to universalise secondary education. Called the National Innovation Fund, the corpus will provide financial support to out-of-the-box projects for which budgetary funds cannot be used because of the risk of failure, top government officials have told The Telegraph. “Think of the fund like a...

If some are still wondering why the census cannot blank out caste, their answer came bobbing in a country boat today. Bill Gates, who usually crosses continents on his $45-million private jet, took the boat that shuddered in the swift waters of the Kosi to reach a remote Bihar village that had hardly ever seen a district official. One of his first questions was if caste divisions in the country’s backward hinterland...