-The Indian Express The 10th edition of the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) by Pratham, released last week, shows that over the last decade, basic learning levels for children in elementary school in India have remained low. Only about half of Class V children in rural India can read a simple Class II level text, and a similar proportion can do a two-digit subtraction problem with borrowing. While there are...

-The Hindu Considering Nobel laureate Amartya Sen's caution regarding the insecurity that people face over a lifetime due to the deprivation of basic education, the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2014 calls for a hard look at the situation. Its findings amount to a distressing catalogue of the failures inherent in the pedagogic methods of instruction in vogue. The foremost among them is the overemphasis on a curriculum that...

-The Hindu None of our Teacher Education programmes has ever seriously tried to achieve a clear and convincing enough understanding of what one tries to achieve through education. It always has been a rhetoric of larger aims and working for myopically understood parental and market aspirations All curricula are situated in contexts and are simultaneously guided by ideals. Therefore, an understanding of and a balance between the two is essential. We have succeeded...

-The Hindu The deaths of Chaiti Bai and other women after a botched tubectomy in Chhattisgarh are an opportunity to reflect on the problems India faces in the pursuit of modernity and global status, especially in health and education A sudden death always has great pedagogical value. The death of Chaiti Bai, a Baiga tribal woman, following a botched tubectomy at a mass sterilisation camp in Chhattisgarh recently, can improve our perspective...

-The Hindu Is India ready to cash in on its demographic dividend? A demographic dividend is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a nation and can either make or mar its citizens' present and future. When the share of the working-age population is on a rising curve while the share of dependents (those under the age of 15 and over 60) is falling, it enables workers to save (hence savings share in GDP rises)...