-Scroll.in With smart classrooms, English lessons and more, a government campaign is restoring parents’ confidence in public schools. For the first time in 25 years, public schools in Kerala registered a year-on-year increase in student enrolment this year. It is a significant ahievement given that 5,715 schools were functioning without adequate student strength till 2016. Data released by the education department last week showed that a little over 1.8 lakh students joined...

-CaravanMagazine.in The economist Jean Drèze’s book, Sense and Solidarity, published in late 2017, deals with the impact of Aadhaar on social-welfare programmes, such as the National Food Security Act and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, among other things. Drèze was a member of the United Progressive Alliance government’s advisory council, which designed the NFSA and MGNREGS. He co-authored some of the essays in this book with colleagues and...

-TheWire.in The MGNREGA website used to be something of a gold standard on information dissemination. But not anymore. Sanjay Sahni is an anti-corruption activist from Muzaffarpur, Bihar. Formally educated only till Class 5, he used to work as an electrician in Delhi until 2012. He came across the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) website by chance, and after several hours of navigating through the complicated web pages, he saw...

-The Indian Express A citizen-centric data eco-system is necessary to protect privacy. Who owns my data? In this question, if you replace data with a physical object, like a car or a house, the answer would obviously be “me”. That’s true not only of physical objects, but also of content because the latter is governed by copyright laws. The principle is you are the owner of the content you create, such as...

-The Indian Express As both IARI and IISS continued refining their respective products, procurement under the soil health card scheme gathered steam when the government sanctioned setting up over 6,000 mini labs in 2016-2017. New Delhi: Despite objections raised by senior officers, a low-cost digital soil-testing technology developed by the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI), under the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), has been tweaked by a sister ICAR institute...