Even as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act enters its sixth year, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar said in Delhi on Thursday that cash transfers were the answer to the eternal questions about inefficiencies in government schemes. He had tried out direct cash transfers in his effort to give Bihar’s girls bicycles, he said, and discovered that the programme had a “92 per cent success rate”. No programme, he said,...

The government has a plan to reach welfare to the poor without wasting money. It wants to put hard cash in their hands instead of spending on welfare programmes. To begin with, it wants to end the public distribution system of food grain and give money directly to the people. Its logic: the new system of cash transfer will plug leakages and save an enormous amount of money. But is it...

Responding to the lack of computer training in Mukteshwar’s schools, Veena Sethi, a retired Delhi University professor, set up two used personal computers in the basement of her home with the aim of bringing the basics of computing to school children. "There were no libraries, no laboratories and no computer classes. In fact, most of the schools in Mukteshwar [which is in the Nainital district of northern Uttarakhand state] had no...

Sitting on his father’s shoulders, two-year-old Rahul Kumar giggles and tugs on a lock of his father’s hair. A happy, healthy-looking boy, Rahul has already seen much of India. Born in a small village in northern Bihar, he has spent roughly half of his short life in Punjab, where his parents work as seasonal farm labourers. He has spent a few months in his parents’ village. The rest has been spent...

Bihar has a refreshing new motif: girls in uniform on shiny new cycles, confident and assured, simply because they go to school. A little over three years ago, the Bihar government launched the Mukhyamantri Balika Cycle Yojana—the chief minister’s cycle scheme for girls. The plan entitled girls in class IX and X to a free cycle from the state or Rs2,000 to buy one—mirroring a scheme started by Tamil Nadu, but...