-The Hindu Amid religious polarisation, agrarian issues still resonate with the community ALIGARH/ HATHRAS: As the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) faces the Jat challenge in western Uttar Pradesh, the message from the ground in Aligarh and Hathras districts is mixed. While there are many who still swear by the ruling party for providing suraksha, bijli aur sadak (safety, electricity and Roads), there are others who feel the party has let down a vote...

Remote teaching and learning promoted by Edtech companies as an alternative to physical classrooms, especially since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, may have a sizeable consumer base in our country. However, at the bottom of the pyramid, there are only a few takers of online education. In reality, class and caste-divide, which is more prominent in rural areas, affects access to digital learning. The majority of the school going...

-Inclusive Media for Change  The pandemic induced school closures have taken a huge toll on the right to education and learning levels of the school children coming from underprivileged sections. A survey covering 1,362 school children (enrolled in Classes 1-8) from 1,362 households, which was carried out in 15 states/ UTs in the month of August 2021 (first round), reveals the catastrophic consequences of prolonged school closure in the last one...

-Newslaundry.com A new survey titled Locked Out notes that 37 percent of rural children are ‘not studying at all’. In the Kumtu tribal hamlet of Jharkhand, eight-year-old Suman, who would now be in Class 3, has not gone to school in nearly two years, owing to the coronavirus-induced lockdown in the country, imposed in March last year. Before the lockdown, when the local government school in her village would open sporadically, Suman...

-Hindustan Times The ₹12,000 crore Char Dham Road project was announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2016 to connect Hindu shrines of Gangotri, Yamnotri, Badrinath and Kedarnth through a four lane all-weather Road The all-weather Char Dham Road in Uttarakhand has witnessed 25 major landslides this rainy season, forcing the administration to close two stretches of Roads in Tehri Garwhal for indefinite periods and indicating that “unscientific” Road construction was causing...