Evidence that poverty has declined since India began to liberalise in the 1980s, that the acceleration in growth to 8-9% range since the mid-2000s has resulted in accelerated poverty reduction and that these trends hold for each broad social group rather than just the aggregate population is as irrefutable as it gets in social sciences. In the accompanying graphic, taken from a recent study by Megha Mukim and the author, show...

-Economic and Political Weekly Two years after the Right to Education Act, the government needs to focus on quality. Two years is perhaps too short a period in which to assess how effective the groundbreaking Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act 2009 (RTE), which came into effect on 1 April 2010, has been in raising standards of education in a country as diverse as India. The very fact that...

-The Telegraph BDO Sisir Kumar Singh and Co. could never have imagined this treasure hunt to go bad. But it did. They were assaulted yesterday on their way back from Kamarchak village where they had traced about 100 antique silver coins that were recovered from a school construction site in neighbouring Bodaiya village, about 40km from the Dumka district headquarters. In the end they managed to salvage 23 coins, the rest were looted, allegedly...

-The Hindu The Maharashtra government-appointed two-member Adarsh judicial commission has concluded that the land where the Adarsh building was constructed belongs to the government. It refuted the Ministry of Defence's claim over the land and concluded that the land was not reserved for Kargil war heroes and their families. Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan on Tuesday tabled the commission's final report on title and reservation of the land in question before the Assembly....

-The Times of India The Maharashtra government is under the scanner for lack of transparency in facilitating planned hill city of Lavasa in state's Pune district. The CAG report has slammed the state "for failing to adhere to regulations, amending existing laws for the project, disturbing the already ecologically fragile environment and violating green norms''. "The project seems to be driven by private interest and not by public interest," the report said. The...