The success of programmes like the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) and Mid Day Meal Scheme (MDMS) in getting most children enrolled at the primary level has created the illusion that the government is now finally getting down to business and boldly financing education. Spending on education quadrupled between 1990-91 and 2000-01 . Since 2004-05 , the combined expenditure on education by the Centre and states has increased at a blistering...

EVERY OTHER day there is either a newspaper report or an editorial comment lamenting the loss of food grain stored in buffer stocks. Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar, while prophesying a bumper kharif crop, admits he is worried about not having adequate storage for the produce. At a national conference in 2003, the Central Warehousing Corporation said it had covered storage capacity for 48 million tonnes of food grain. In 2002,...

The Centre wants all `kutcha' houses to be replaced by durable, disaster-resistant structures by 2016-17. It forms the big expression of intent in the first-of-its-kind `rural housing and habitat policy' that UPA may announce soon. The government wants to engage NGOs in rural housing, a sector the voluntary organisations have shunned till now. The government feels the rural populace will benefit from NGOs in the field of "technology dissemination" and...

While India’s new Right to Education Act seeks to bring free and compulsory education for all children, it seems to short-change them through an unrealistic vision of the private sector’s involvement. In August 2009, the Right to Education Act was passed in the Indian Parliament with no debate, by the fewer than 60 members who happened to be attending the session that day. Not that the Act was an open-and-shut...

A UNESCO dossier examines the problems faced by the original tribal inhabitants of the Andaman islands. SINCE the 1780s, a variety of players have vied for space in the Andaman archipelago. Today, apart from the three wings of the country's armed forces, others including rice farmers, timber merchants and academics are trying to push out its original inhabitants from their traditional habitats. For the first time in the past 150 years,...