Rather than shutting its doors on ‘civil society’, the government should be thanking its stars that the latter wants to make law, not war. Distributing tee-shirts with this slogan would be a better use of the government’s ‘hearts and minds’ funds than the integrated action plan to counter Naxals, or the army’s tourism trips to Pune for Kashmiri schoolgirls. The UPA regime has been unprecedented for the spate of legislation that...
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Donors shun water projects by Fiona Harvey
More than one billion people will not get the basic sanitation and the clean water promised as such projects shrink sharply as a proportion of global aid budgets. A key development goal to halve the number of people without access to basic sanitation by 2015 will be missed because donor countries have diverted aid money away from unglamorous water projects, according to the World Bank and the charity WaterAid. Aid to...
More »RTE Act will take 3 more years to show results: Sibal
-PTI Faced with teacher shortage and other infrastructural hurdles, the Government has said the ambitious Right of Children to Free and Compulsory education (RTE) Act will take at least three more years to show results. "It (RTE Act) is going to take three years at least. This is not something that is going to bear fruit tomorrow," HRD Minister Kapil Sibal told PTI. Many hurdles have to be overcome for effective implementation...
More »RTE’s elementary problem: Lack of trained teachers for Class I to V by Chinki Sinha
With the Right of all Children to Free and Compulsory education Act mandating a 30:1 teacher pupil ratio and laying down minimum qualifications for teachers, state governments have expressed concerns about the lack of infrastructure to provide the required training. Only diploma-holders in elementary education are allowed to teach students from Class I to V and there is a shortage of teachers in this category. As per the HRD Ministry, of the...
More »Ending Indifference: A Law to Exile Hunger? by Harsh Mander
Can we agree in this country on a floor of human dignity below which we will not allow any human being to fall? No child, woman or man in this land will sleep hungry. No person shall be forced to sleep under the open sky. No parent shall send their child out to work instead of to school. And no one shall die because they cannot afford the cost of...
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