-The Hindu Launched in 2006 by the JD(U)-BJP government at the time, the scheme provided money to all girls who enrolled in Class IX through their schools to buy themselves a cycle. The first independent, scientific evaluation of the impact of Bihar's cycles-for-girls programme has shown that the scheme significantly improved female school enrolment and substantially reduced the gender gap in secondary school enrolment. The study, by Karthik Muralidharan, an economist at...

-The Times of India LONDON: London School of Economics' Ideas for Growth conference on Monday hailed the Bihar government's 'bicycles-to-girls' policy as one that can be imitated globally. Bihar witnessed a 30% increase in school attendance by girls in just one year, thanks to the bicycles policy. With a high school dropout rate among girls, the state government had rolled out the policy under which every 14-year-old schoolgirl was given money to...

-Newsclick.in Forty years back a young scholar with a fresh PhD in Physics from Delhi University took a train to Hoshangabad in Madhya Pradesh. It was to be a turning point in the life of Vinod Raina, for this short train journey was to transform him into a lifetime social activist, campaigner and educationist in the true sense. He left behind the glamour world of theoretical Physics to plunge into the...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: India will seek changes to international copyright regulations so that students and researchers can procure photocopies of expensive books without having to pay royalties, a senior government source said. Come December, he said, the Union human resource development ministry will ask the World Intellectual Property Organisation (Wipo) to relax its norms that protect authors' and publishers' commercial rights over their books. The ministry will suggest at the next general...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: More than three years after the implementation of the RTE Act and an expenditure of over Rs 46,282.11 crore on school infrastructure, around 1.28 lakh out of 10,75,407 government elementary schools across the country still don't have toilets and over 61,000 lack drinking water facilities. According to the District Information System for Education 2011-12, Bihar has 18,169 schools without lavatories, the highest among states. Andhra Pradesh...