The tenth annual status of education report (ASER), 2014, says while the elementary education has grown over the last few years, the learning is still in crisis. Only a small improvement is seen in reading and the overall situation with basic reading continues to be disheartening. The report was released on Tuesday (January 13). The Pratham team covered over 5.6 lakh children fro
The government of India is a closed shop; its bureaucracy is recruited in its youth and rises in the hierarchy in order of seniority. One exception to this rule is the chief economic advisor, who is sometimes a professional economist who has made his name outside. Arun Jaitley has recently recruited Arvind Subramaniam from Peterson Institute in Washington. This is laudable both because Arvind i
A founder member of Penguin India, David Davidar spent 25 years with the publishing giant in various capacities before moving back to India to start his own publishing venture Aleph Book Company in partnership with Rupa Publications. He is also an acclaimed author of three novels. He spoke to Shreerupa Mitra-Jha about the new anthology of Indian short stories he has edited, and
When 24 out of the 45 Bharat Ratnas awarded till date belong to a single community (read brahmins), it indicates a problem. It indicates how in a country where diversity is such that the language changes every 20 kilometres, it is only a single community capable of producing more than 50 percent of the worthy Indians. The problem thus becomes two-pronged. Is it that in a highly d
It’s been more than a year since Prof Ashish Nanda took over as director of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A). An IIT-Delhi and IIM-A alumnus and former Robert Braucher professor of practice at Harvard Law School, Nanda, 54, is a man on a mission. At IIM-A he has brought in changes in the selection of students and introduced deferred admission system. In an interview w
A few months ago, prime minister Narendra Modi declared in his Independence Day speech the new government’s intentions to replace the existing commission with one more in sync with the socio-economic realities of the country. This declaration only served to formalise what a chain of events had been working up to: earlier this year, for the first time since it was set up in 1950, the commi
Here are the bald facts. In Hyderabad, Mili Srivastava had ordered a book from Flipkart, the e-commerce giant, and it arrived before it was due. She was away from home when she received an SMS with the delivery boy’s details and asked her domestic help to take the delivery. The delivery boy was not the same as the one whose details had been sent to her phone. He attempted to rape the
Stephen Alter’s latest non-fiction, ‘Becoming a Mountain—In Search of the Sacred and the Sublime’, was recently released in the capital. The American author was born and raised in the foothills of the Himalayas in Mussoorie. He talks to Shreerupa Mitra about his latest book, the need for good translation in Indian regional writing and his brush with Bollywood.
With two ordinances on Monday, the new government has achieved a record of sorts: there have been nine ordinances so far in about seven months. The ordinance route is emerging as the instrument of the Modi model of governance. The government in fact began the business with an ordinance – amending the TRAI law so that its former chairman Nripendra Mishra can be made principal secretary to
What change you have seen in Kashmir during the last 14 years? The biggest change is that the Kashmiri people have realised that the gun is their enemy. It is clear now that they are not cut out for the gun culture and violence. The fact is that the Indian army and security forces have seized nearly 95,000 guns and ammunition from militant organisations. This is a huge q
What do you make of the huge voter turnout? People have voted in huge numbers for two reasons. One is the recent floods in Kashmir. Somewhere people have realised that they need a government and systems that work or else such mismanagement will continue to recur. The flood was a grave reminder to all of us that we need a government to run the daily affairs of
Prime minister Narendra Modi’s Digital India campaign has the potential to be one of the most transformative programmes in recent times. It includes creation of ICT infrastructure like high-speed internet at gram panchayat level, on-demand availability of government services like health, education, and digital empowerment of citizens. The Digital India vision is in sync wit
What does the huge voter turnout in the valley mean? People have voted on the issue of ‘sadak, pani and bijli’– development. However, this is not going to impact our movement [for azadi or independence]. I am confident that all those who have voted in the election are also for freedom. Hence, the voter turnout is insignificant for us. I always had
Adjectives were flying high inside the seat of power and with plenty of import and meanings. The parliament on Thursday witnessed an intelligent play of words and politics of different opinions. While the opposition parties thought the government was adamant on not letting Prime Minister Narendra Modi make a statement on conversion issue, the government called the opposition arrogant for holdin
There are black days in history. Opaque and beyond the pale of human understanding. We know it is not a perfect world and we are imperfect people and, therefore, we do imperfect things. But these black days are not about imperfection. They fall so deep into the dark of the abyss within us and without that they take us back to the days of savagery and tell us that though the years and centuries
Sarbananda Sonowal, a young and firebrand leader, is BJP’s rising star in Assam. He is now in charge of a ministry that does not make many headlines but whose work would be uppermost on the minds of most Indians. Sonowal spoke with Sweta Ranjan about the government’s plans for sports. Edited excerpts: There is a need for more transpare-ncy in
The human race (that means you) does incredibly stupid things. A friend of mine is stuck in India because his passport has expired. You nitwit, didn’t you see the date? How do you travel without checking your passport? Very easily. Like him, there are thousands every day caught in their own ignorance. We even lose the document. Every time I read in the classifieds co
Even though Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM’s) budget allocation for education has doubled between 2009 -2015, there is a drop of 11 percent students from municipal schools during this period. Despite education budget increasing from Rs1,255 crore in 2009-2010 to Rs 2,870 crore in 2014-2015; 51,649 students have dropped out of municipal schools. While per chil
I had been racking my brain all day today trying to pinpoint what exactly led to the tragic Uber cab incident in which a professional was raped by the driver of the cab she had hired through the aggregator. I made hectic calls to Meru, Mega and Easy cabs trying to find out, both as a concerned woman passenger and a curious journalist, what their safety policies are. In between I indulged in cur
It must be wonderful to sit behind a counter and accept and reject applications made to your country by people who want to go there and you don`t particularly want them to come. The power and the glory, for a brief shining moment I am a better man than you, Gunga Din. I am so pleased that Mr Modi has given the citizens of 53 countries the okay to pop in to India and get a visa on
