Increased representation for women can unleash a broader process that can be set in motion by the strength of sheer numbers. One measure of whether it is important to have women in important policy formulation roles is to examine how a largely male-dominated system of government has served women. It turns out that India performs very poorly in this regard. Despite a few heartening examples to the contrary, in general Indian...

The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act (RTE Act) will be notified on April 1. The Act attempts to address the historical problem of continuing illiteracy as well as the lack of educational opportunities that persist for sections of our population even sixty years after adoption of the Indian constitution. The socio-political, legal and financial aspects of the Act have been much debated and its final form...

Government policy towards school education is schizophrenic. While on the one hand, it is working on rules to set up, to begin with, 2,500 public private partnership schools as a means to see how it can increase private sector involvement in providing education to the underprivileged (economically or socially) in a bigger way; on the other, it is all set to virtually nationalise elementary education in the country through the...

Forget the rhetoric, the FM’s left little for core social sectors The Union finance minister’s enthusiasm in marking the roadmap to financial discipline and pushing reforms in Budget 2010 is somehow missing in his proposals for inclusive growth. These proposals lack the required homework—in referring to relevant literature, including some recent government reports, and in making estimates of the required funds—and certainly do not reflect much commitment to inclusive growth. Agriculture—which...

It's a myth that the global financial crisis left India virtually unscathed. In fact, India is the biggest victim of financial crisis-induced poverty, according to data obtained by TOI from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs' (UNDESA). Check out these figures. The UNDESA data estimates that the number of India's poor was 33.6 million higher in 2009 than would have been the case if the growth rates...