Adolescent girls face nutritional problems than boys of that age: report Having more than 243 million adolescents – the highest in the world – the key challenge that India faces is ensuring the nutritional, health and educational needs of this population, particularly girls. Over the past two decades, rapid economic growth – with real gross domestic product averaging 4.8 per cent between 1990 and 2009 – has lifted millions out of...

The Nagla elementary school in this north Indian town looks like many other rundown government schools. Sweater-clad children sit on burlap sheets laid in rows on cold concrete floors. Lunch is prepared out back on a fire of burning twigs and branches. But the classrooms of Nagla are a laboratory for an educational approach unusual for an Indian public school. Rather than being drilled and tested on reproducing passages from...

Even four years after the Sachar Committee Report revealed that Muslims were one of the most economically backward and socially disadvantaged communities, nothing much has been done to address the development deficits of this community. The Constitution of the republic of free India was crafted in troubled but idealistic times. The Indian people were still reeling from Partition bloodshed and the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, in the dark shadows of politics...

With 80 per cent of the world’s people lacking adequate social protection and global inequalities growing, top United Nations officials are calling for a new era of social justice that offers basic services, decently paid jobs, and safeguards for the poor, vulnerable and marginalized. “Social justice is more than an ethical imperative; it is a foundation for national stability and global prosperity,” Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a message ahead of...

Pranab Mukherjee today got an opportunity to escape the drudgery of financial jargon and immerse himself in phrases such as poor, women, Muslims, farmers, weavers and prices. At an annual pre-budget exercise at the Congress headquarters, most party leaders asked the finance minister to provide relief to “the common man”, bring down inflation to a single digit, reduce petrol prices, lower interest rates on agriculture, housing and education loans and offer...