Sanjay Kumar

The indifferent success of the present system of primary education in India, which has left 30 million children out of schools, calls for a complete change of the method of delivery of education. The model discussed here has features that ensure flexibility, accountability and quality, which can help achieve the threefold objectives of elementary education - universal access, universal retention and universal achievement.

Imperialist Ignorance SANJAY KUMAR The gyrations of public opinion in the US and UK about the war in Iraq is the first puzzle for any one trying to understand how these societies generate an internal popular base for imperialism. Before the war started large proportion of citizens of these countries, certainly the majority in Britain, were against it. However, after the not-so-difficult sailing of the Anglo-American forces in Iraq, domestic opinion has swung remarkably in favour of war. In some polls the rating of George Bush has rocketed to over 90 per cent, while in Britain only a determined minority is still against the war. And this has happened without any evidence of so-called Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the original pretext for invading Iraq, surfacing during the war. Nor have ordinary Iraqis welcomed Americans and British as liberators. If anything, the scramble among American companies to get contracts for building Iraq after American weapons have done a thorough job of destroying that country, giving not even crumbs to companies from the junior ally, has made the true imperialist intent behind aggression even more clear. Then how is one to explain the swing in favour of war? The puzzle deepens if one realises that these societies retain the liberal democratic virtue of freedom of expression and organisation around a diversity of issues and opinions. It is possible only in the US that a winner of an award at a film event designed for mass entertainment can call Bush a fool.1 Rather than seeing the swing for war as a mere reflection of a fickle public opinion, we argue that it should be viewed as a window to the ideology of ordinary citizens in these countries. On closer inspection they do not show up as swaggering imperialists ready to put others in their place. Rather, before the war when their consent was asked for by their rulers on the basis of evidence that was proven to be fabricated the day it was shown, a large number of these citizens registered their disapproval. They showed an acute sense of individual moral responsibility with poster-slogans like

The Gujarat elections threw up a landslide victory for the BJP proving numerous opinion and exit polls wrong. This article based on pre and post poll survey conducted by the CSDS tries to look at reasons behind the BJP�s stunning win across different regions of Gujarat, issues that affected the common man and trends in voting patterns of people from different social communities.

How successful have state sponsored efforts been at redressing the issue of caste-based inequality in India? This paper analyses the impact of such efforts by probing trends in social mobility and exploring the relationship between caste and occupation. The primary focus is to explore what, if anything, has changed and have such changes made India a more fluid and mobile society than before.