The report presents a mixed picture. Over the past 25 years, there have been notable improvements in child well-being in the group of countries examined in this report: steady decline in child mortality, overall reduction in adolescent suicide and increase in school completion rates. But the last five years have …
PRIMARY schools with a difference have sprung up in some villages around the elite Rishi Valley School (RVS) in Andhra Pradesh. These satellite schools, started by the Rural Extension Centre (REC) of the RVS, use instruction cards, puzzles and games instead of standard text books to make education interesting. The …
ANIMAL stories have always been the staple fare of children's fiction, but now a conscious attempt is being made by some publishers to bring out children's books with environmental themes. These publications are generally well illustrated and this makes them even more attractive to children. The 1991-92 collection of Children's …
FROM VERY small children we receive an education which is very different from white children, ladinos. We Indians have more contact with nature. That's why they call us polytheistic. But we're not polytheistic... or if we are, it's good, because it's our culture, our customs. We worship -- or rather …
In 1981, there were 181.03 million illiterate females in India. By 1991, this figure reached 197.34 million -- an increase of about 16.31 million in just one decade. And, this occurred though the literacy rate for Indian females aged seven and above increased during the same decade from 29.75 per …
IT IS A daring and formidable task to synthesise the insights of social and physical anthropology, physiology, epidemiology, micro-economics and macro-economics. This has been attempted with considerable success in this book by focussing primarily on survival strategies of rural households in "developing" countries in the face of both chronic and …
"ONE BY one each of the girls answered my questions. What was their name and age? What do they do during the day? What do their parents do? Had they ever been to school and for how long? The children were remarkably articulate. Half of the children had been to …
THE CHILDREN of Anna Nagar, a slum in New Delhi, draw crowds when they put on street plays they wrote themselves on socially relevant issues that range from the danger posed by multinationals to the evils of illiteracy. Kelewallah (banana vendor), is typical of their productions, telling as it does …
CHILDHOOD malnutrition may not have an influence on adult intelligence, states a study by the National Institute of Nutrition (NIN) in Hyderabad. On the other hand, "the socioeconomic status of the family, especially the educational level, emerges as the most important factor influencing intelligence" (ICMR Bulletin, Vol 2 No 6). …
HOW MUCH is 87265 multiplied by 32117? In our familiar method of multiplication, it will take five steps of multiplication and one step of addition to obtain the answer, apart from the rechecking to ensure the answer is correct. Yet, if the relevant formula from Vedic mathematics is known, the …
I'VE JUST made a rather chastening, even humiliating, discovery. To prepare for this piece, I glanced through the two huge files of yellowing cuttings, which record my 70 months or so of subcontinental reporting for The Guardian. And in all that time, I've written only a couple of dozen longish …
INDIAN students already have classes beamed via an Indian satellite. Now they can talk back to their teachers via a new link. If a 10-day experiment of a satellite-based continuing education programme of the Institute of Electronics and Telecommunication (IET) and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) takes off, a …
MEDICAL education is suddenly making news. A spate of student agitations in Tamil Nadu; an ordinance banning capitation fee in the state; a petition against private colleges in Andhra Pradesh; and, two ordinances by the Centre making it mandatory for new medical colleges to get prior approval from the government, …
I WAS lucky that my childhood memories and later my life as a civil servant gave me insights into demographic behaviour. My boyhood recollection of an evening of listening to my father and his friends soon after the 1931 census results were published, left an abiding impression of the reasons …
FLIP-CHART presentations, rock concerts and relaxed Sunday-morning conversations at a Madras street corner or over a cup of tea on the highway are some of the strategies being used by concerned volunteers in Tamil Nadu to educate high-risk groups on the steps they must take to avoid contracting AIDS. The …
THE QUALITY of mathematics education in the land that produced the mathematical genius Ramanujam has fallen considerably over the years, if India's poor showing at the recent international maths Olympiad (IMO) in Moscow is any indication. But according to some educators, the fault also partially lies in the selection process …
NESTLED amid pine forests, apple orchards and vegetable gardens at Kausani, in UP"s Almora district, is Lakshmi Ashram, a residential school begun 45 years ago and featuring a distinctive pattern of education, placing special emphasis on ecological consciousness. The students come mostly from remote hill villages and from extremely poor …
WHEN SLIGHTLY built Saif Ali, 22, looks out from his home in Choti Nahar, on the outskirts of Pathankot on the highway to Gurdaspur, he sees the blue-grey hills of the Dhauladhar range in the distance. It's not just physical distance that separates him from the mountains, it's a whole …
THE FIRST Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) was set up at Kharagpur in 1952. Since then, around 37,000 B Tech graduates have passed out of this and the four other IITs in Kanpur, Delhi, Bombay and Madras. The estimated annual income and expenditure of these five institutions are about Rs …
FOR SCIENCE buffs television is no longer the wasteland it used to be.Though Calcutta Doordarshan's hardy staple, Quest, persists with questions like "what happens when liquid nitrogen is poured on water", and its two earnest Bengalis at a table format, a lot else has also come to pass. On the …
THE crowd gasps as a sadhu pierces his tongue with a trishul. Chants of awed reverence go up as a baba lights the hawan kunda (sacrificial pyre) with super-natural powers and another passes a flaming torch over his body. It is to expose such miracles and to promote scientific awareness …
