The human resource development ministry is planning to set up colleges, Kendriya Vidyalayas, secondary schools and girls’ hostels in Naxalite-affected areas. The ministry’s higher education department, in a letter written on August 20, has asked the home ministry for details of Naxalite-hit areas. “The information will help in planning how and where to set up new institutions. We will also explore how to provide more grants to institutions in those areas through...

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...

One looks forward to the Finance Minister's budget speech with a hope that it spells some new major initiatives and schemes for development, and that it might promise any major allocation of resources to any sector, besides fresh tax proposals. In the case of education sector, one might feel disappointed at the proposals made in the Union budget for 2010-11 on both counts. No new initiatives are proposed; no major...

* Secondary education is critical in breaking the intergenerational cycle of poverty. * The number of secondary school students is expected to increase from 40 to 60 million over the next decade. * India needs to prepare now for this expansion and improve the quality of secondary education provided. In today’s global knowledge economy, education plays a vital role in determining a country’s economic growth and its people’s standards of living. Importantly,...

KEY TRENDS   • At the national level, the proportion of government schools having facilities like drinking water was 96.39 percent, boys' toilet was 94.64 percent, girls' toilet was 97.03 percent, boundary wall was 60.12 percent, playground was 56.98 percent, ramp was 71.50 percent, CWSN toilet was 19.59 percent, electricity was 56.45 percent and library was 79.36 percent, according to the Unified District Information System For Education (UDISE) 2017-18 (Provisional) *12   • ASER 2019 ‘Early Years’ data shows a clear...