-Newsclick.in UNICEF urged governments to prioritise the safe reopening of all schools, while also ensuring that children are able to pursue quality learning remotely if necessary. At least 80% of children in India between the age of 14-18 years reported lower levels of learning during the Covid-19 pandemic than when physically at school, according to a recent UNICEF report. The report pointed out that despite government, private and civil society actors coming together...

-Livemint.com Beset by poor technology access and ineffective online classes, students from poor households have lost reading abilities significantly, suggests a new survey covering 15 states. The losses are much more stark for students from marginalized communities With most Indian schools shut for the past year and a half, children from poor households, particularly those from marginalized backgrounds, are rapidly forgetting what they had learned before the pandemic, new survey data suggests. Less...

-The Hindu As of August 10 this year, 34% transactions are still unpaid, says LibTech study Delay on the part of the Union Government in transfer of wages to workers under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), 2005, has further compounded the woes of thousands of workers during these difficult pandemic times. The Centre is taking 26 days on an average to complete the wage transfer to the NREGA workers...

-Down to Earth blog The ecology of Himachal Pradesh’s hydropower hub is too fragile for such projects “Twenty-five years ago, people could be excused for not knowing much, or doing much about climate change. Today, we have no excuses,” Desmond Tutu, South African theologian, had said. The recent landslides in Himachal Pradesh's Kinnaur district brought back focus on how 40 per cent of the state is geologically ‘highly sensitive’, according to a report...

-ThePrint.in Any technological intervention that intensifies policing will aggravate the historical systemic bias, particularly against Muslims living in over-policed areas like Old Delhi or Nizamuddin. The use of new technology, including facial recognition technology (FRT) by police in India brings with it questions of efficiency, surveillance, and discrimination. Existing research focuses on the legal dimensions of FRT with an emphasis on privacy. In this paper, we provide an empirical basis to understand...