Every afternoon at about four, a slight woman named Runi slips out of the cramped, airless room that she shares with her husband and their sixteen children. She skirts the drainage ditch in front of the building, then walks toward the pile of hardened dung cakes that people in this slum on the edge of the northeastern Indian city of Patna use for fuel. Dressed in a bright-yellow sari shot...

All school children across the country will soon have unique identification numbers (UID) which will help in tracking their movement in educational institutions and academic records. This follows the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between the Union Human Resource Development Ministry and the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) here on Wednesday. The system will help in tracking students' mobility by creating an electronic registry, right from the primary level through...

Vedanta, Posco and Sindhudurg. The issue is the same — the need for a well-thought-out policy relating to extractive and resource-based industry. The government’s withdrawal of mining permission to Vedanta on the Niyamgiri hills in Orissa’s backward Kalahandi district; the divided verdict by the Gupta Committee on the Posco iron ore project; and the environment ministry’s concern on 49 mining licences issued by the Maharashtra government for bauxite and iron...

The Union government is reneging on its legal obligation to pay minimum wages, even to the most deprived sections of the population, in the implementation of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme. If anyone wants to study the capacity of India's policymakers to turn a progressive piece of legislation upside down, the wage policy under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) is a good place to...

Physical access to schooling and socio-cultural difference between children from scheduled tribes and children from the mainstream are factors responsible for tribal children being deprived of basic education, and the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory to Education (RTE) Act, 2009, will not necessarily help the tribal population of the country, reveals a recent study. A study, carried out by S N Tripathi of the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics...