-The Hindu Parliamentary panel pushes for it in all government schools in coming academic year The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education has recommended that all government schools start providing free breakfast in the coming academic year, as part of an expansion of the mid-day meal scheme envisaged by the National Education Policy. However, Education Ministry officials say a severe funding crunch is likely to delay the initiative. Free breakfasts would involve an additional...

-The Hindu Bengaluru schools are working with teachers and parents to help students overcome screen fatigue The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has not only upended the way we socialise or interact with each other, but has also altered the learning patterns of lakhs of students with online classes becoming the norm. For the last nine months, students in private schools have been glued to their screens for hours on end where otherwise they would...

School meals ensure nutrition for millions of vulnerable children across the world. Almost 370 million children worldwide are covered by school feeding programmes. While 100 million school children benefitted from the noon meal scheme in India prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, countries like Brazil (48 million), China (44 million), South Africa (9 million) and Nigeria (9 million) too run similar programmes for school children. However, an estimated 39 billion in-school...

-Hindustan Times The data, culled from the education department of Delhi, and civic bodies that run the municipal schools, shows that these children have simply fallen off the map -- the schools say they can’t trace them. Over 166,000 students in Delhi’s government and municipal schools are missing, the impact of education moving online as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. The number is roughly 8.5% of the students enrolled in the...

-The Indian Express No announcements on recovering learning loss, support for children at risk of not returning to school. The government’s proposed spending on education next year has been cut by Rs 6,000 crore at a time when the Covid-19-induced disruption is expected to have exacerbated students’ learning loss and school dropout rates. The total education budget was slashed by 6 per cent from Rs 99,311 crore in 2020-21 to Rs 93,224 crore...