They continue Schooling from an ashram run by a social worker Administration and voluntary organisations should educating the tribals on the ways of development Tribals must be assured that their resources will not be exploited by outsiders Seven-year-old Baiju wears a lost look. His eyes look pale, but his gaze penetrates you. He only mumbles his name and his weak structure is indication enough of his fragile health. At the tender age of...

A decline of 2.6 million in elementary education enrolments from 2007 to 2010, the years of Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan's trumpeted success, needs careful analysis. Enrolment data, based on school statistics, deals with the supply-side only. Census or NSS data , based on household information, gives us the demand-side of school enrolments. The two should roughly match, as they do in half of India, but not for UP, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh,...

The first results of Census 2011 put India's population at 1,210 million, indicating a demographic transition. CENSUS 2011 is the 15th one undertaken in India since 1872 and the seventh after the country attained Independence. While there have been stray historical references to population counts of one kind or another in earlier periods over much smaller territories within the territory that constitutes present-day India, the consensus view is that the...

Cash transfer as substitute for state service provision is a dangerous recipe for callously anti-poor and corrupt governance. THE staggering number of recent articles, papers and books on the virtues of giving cash in place of public services to the poor has created an impression that a sort of epidemic has broken out. Economists, policymakers, bureaucrats and newspaper commentators are all infected by it and are in turn infecting others. The central...

The Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act was passed in August 2009 — a momentous decision, if decades too late. Since last April, when it started functioning, the state has been required, by law, to provide a neighbourhood school that meets a minimum standard within three years. The act mandates a whole range of measures to upgrade the number and quality of schools, like specified teacher-student ratios, making sure...