-Civil Society News, Gurugram THROUGHOUT the first and second waves of the coronavirus pandemic, the extent of the tragedy in India was mostly unknown. How many people had really died? Were they men or women? Information was anecdotal and speculative. This April, there were queues at crematoriums and burial grounds, but even as bodies piled up there were no reliable figures to go by. We now have some figures based on data-hunting...

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...

-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.  ...

-The New Indian Express Report highlights the challenges of online classes; over 90% of underprivileged parents want schools to reopen BENGALURU: Continuous school closures and the limited reach of online/remote learning in the last 18 months have had “catastrophic consequences for children, on the academic, emotional, nutritional, social, and economic fronts,” states the National Coalition on Education Emergency (NCEE) in its September 5 report - ‘End Education Exclusion: Resume and Renew Education...

-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...