A new study published in medical journal Lancet on accelerating decline in the deaths of children under five years between 2000 and 2010 as compared to 1990-2000 has got its figures wrong on India, says Save the Children, a non-governmental organisation. According to the Lancet report, across 21 regions of the world, rates of neonatal, post-neonatal, and childhood mortality are declining. The study also claims that worldwide, deaths of children under five...

Newly released National Sample Survey data shows that the proportion of students in private educational institutions has increased at the cost of those in government institutions, but private education remains affordable only to upper classes. Meanwhile, expenditure on education, particularly private education, is growing much faster than household Budgets. The NSS 64th round (2007-8) records data on participation and expenditure on education after a gap of 11 years. The NSS...

PRIME Minister Manmohan Singh complimented his government on the progress of flagship programmes in his opening statement at the national press conference held recently, but was candid about challenges related to their implementation. UPA’s schemes for the poor have been at the core of the government’s ‘inclusive development’ agenda and were credited with bringing Congress back to power. Yet the government is unable to implement well the Mahatma Gandhi National...

The Indian Electricity Act, 2003, initially envisaged that the appropriate governments shall endeavour to supply electricity to all areas including villages and hamlets (Section 6), thus placing the responsibility for ensuring rural electricity supply on state governments. The UPA-I government amended this section to read as follows after detailed deliberations internally and with opposition parties: the concerned state government and the central government shall jointly endeavour to provide access to...

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...