-Business Standard Most parents want physical classrooms to reopen With most schools shut for the past year and a half, 75 per cent parents feel their child’s reading ability has massively declined and almost all of them want physical classrooms to immediately reopen, shows a recent survey. Please click here to read more.  ...

-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 37% of rural children have dropped out, says report of study on 15 States The prolonged closure of primary and upper primary schools during the pandemic months has led to “catastrophic consequences” for school students, particularly in rural India, says an emergency report. Based on the School Children’s Online and Offline Learning (SCHOOL) survey conducted by researchers, who worked in coordination with eminent economist Jean Dreze, the ‘Emergency Report on School...

-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...

-NDTV.com With 186 people in hospital and a high number of affected children, the Firozabad administration has ordered closure of schools for Classes 1-8. Firozabad: The death of 53 people, including 45 children, over the past 10 days in a suspected dengue outbreak in Firozabad has prompted the Uttar Pradesh government to set up an inquiry. At the Firozabad medical college, the scenes are horrifying: rows of children suffering from fever and their...