-The Business Standard The Prime Minister's Rural Development Fellows are being pampered with funds to serve for just two years   The Prime Minister's Rural Development Fellows scheme, announced two years ago, sounded like a novel way to connect educated youth to the problems of backward rural areas hit by Maoist violence. But it is now surrounded by questions as its financial size is now larger than the problem it seeks to solve...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Fed up with the service of your cooking gas dealer? Well, from Saturday you can switch to another nearby dealer - even if it belongs to another company - in 30 cities. Along with this scheme, which is similar to number portability for mobiles, oil minister M Veerappa Moily would on that day also launch sale of 5kg cooking gas cylinders in select company-owned petrol...

-The Indian Express Thiruvananthapuram: Underage marriage among Muslims has ignited a debate in Kerala, with the community's most influential organisation vowing to get legitimacy for the practice while political parties and women's groups have said it would be a setback when Muslim girls have been making strides in education. It was triggered by a government effort to ratify underage marriages that have already taken place, because many such couples were finding...

-The Indian Express Delhi: Each time students at the Government Boys Senior Secondary School in Dilshad Garden ask their principal to recruit a full-time computer teacher, they are told to take private tuitions instead. "If we push too hard, he threatens to strike the subject off. Forget excelling, how are we expected to even clear our exams without a teacher?" asks a Class XI student. Students of the school, though, are relatively...

Bihar Government's programme of distributing bicycles to school girls may be a modest intervention but is leading to big changes. A new research-based paper, brought out in August 2013, corroborates the success of the programme and testifies that it is leading to improved school enrollment of girls and arresting their dropout rates (See links below to read full paper and earlier studies on the subject).   Based on econometric and statistical models,...