The shorter and more dramatic format of Twenty20 cricket was bound to be successful and provide a real challenge to the most traditional format of test cricket and also allowed cricket to compete for viewership with other games such as football. But the real novelty of the IPL lies in its open, blatant and even exuberant celebration of the commercial principle.

In all Indian cities and towns and increasingly in rural areas, taking private tuition has now become common practice and at fees which are much higher than the regular school fees. A remarkable feature of our school education system is the way it has allowed and even encouraged the proliferation of this system. However, not only is the system deeply inequalising, it adversely affects the quality of the school education system itself.

The implementation of land reforms makes the West Bengal Panchayat system a much more egalitarian institution from both a class and a caste point of view, which the rest of India has not been able to replicate in general. This progress in West Bengal is noticeable even in the high participation of women in the Panchayat system.

The issue of reservations in higher education in India has been a volatile issue which also has direct implications not only for public policy but also for the administration and functioning of academic institutions, not to mention the fate of a large number of students. This note is an attempt to add to the currently meagre empirical literature by analysing the available evidence on the actual extent of marginalisation and discrimination apparently faced by different categories in the population, based on the results of the most recent large National Sample Survey

The management of huge and growing quantities of electronic waste may emerge as one of the more important environmental problems of developing countries in the near future. The problems arise from the very significant health and environmental hazards associated with e-waste. As usual, this impact is worse in developing countries, where people often live in close proximity to dumps or landfills of untreated e-waste.

Changing labour market dynamics and continued upper caste hindu domination of the most dynamic segments of the urban economy, which has come about as a result of their privileged access to institutions of higher learning, clearly necessitate an expansion of reservations in favour of OBCs. Elite blocking strategies are therefore politically counter-productive and socially expensive.

This review of a book of memoirs by Ashok Mitra points out that all his endearing and contradictory personal attributes, combined with his indisputable literary flair and prodigious memory, are what make the book so absorbing and so much fun to read. The final sections of the book though do carry perhaps too much of the perception that everything - even progressive politics and literature - was better in the past.

It seems that in education as in so many other areas, the UPA government has now gone almost completely off track. The distortion of the promised Right to Education Bill, involving the proposal to suggest a model bill to be enacted by state governments without any additional financial commitment by the centre, is one example of this callous and cynical attitude. The reduction of the proposed outlay on elementary education in the coming years is another.

The basic thrust of government education spending today must surely be to ensure that all children have access to government schools, and to raise the quality of these schools. A voucher system would not only divert much-needed resources, it would also divert our attention from addressing the real issues involved in improving quality in school education.

Providing free and universal access to basic services as far as possible is important not only in welfare terms or because the poor have a human right to health and education, but also because the social costs of poor health and inadequate educational development are large. Recognising this, there is an important trend even in the market-dependent US towards universal healthcare coverage.

A recent book throws into sharp relief the process by which competitive brand positioning has come to dominate all higher educational activities in the US. This entire approach creates basic changes in the way higher education is conceived and delivered so that the central mission of universities to advance and transmit knowledge has been largely ousted by this branding process.

The arguments about the economic benefits that a demographic bulge can provide India become invalid against the backdrop of the latest NSS data on employment and unemployment. The growing numbers of young unemployed given by the recent data suggest that the potential advantages of a demographic dividend will be outweighed by social instability.

Offshoring of services in India is now seeing its new 'avatar' in the form of surrogate motherhood which has become a highly profitable source of foreign exchange earning through ''reproductive tourism''. If government leaves it unregulated and provides the wrong incentives, it poses a significant threat to the physical and emotional health of women in general and poor women in particular.