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...
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More than 2.57 lakh people evicted in India during the pandemic; 21 people evicted from their homes every hour, says latest report
-Press release by Housing and Land Rights Network (HLRN) dated 9th September, 2021 Housing and Land Rights Network (HLRN), today, released its new report on forced evictions in India. Titled, Forced Evictions in India in 2020: A Grave Human Rights Crisis During the Pandemic, this report presents comprehensive data and an analysis of forced evictions and demolitions of homes of the urban and rural poor across the country in 2020. It...
More »RBI proposal to loosen lending norms for private players a catastrophe in the making -Rana Mitra
-Frontline.thehindu.com The RBI’s proposal to loosen regulations for private lenders in the microfinance space will have disastrous consequences for the poor, especially women in rural areas. Microfinance, a category of financial services aimed at serving people from low-income households who lack access to conventional banking credit and services, was originally designed by international finance capital institutions such as the World Bank as an alternative to providing direct concessional credit to the poor—which...
More »Women Farmers Are Losing Jobs, Earnings, Savings Even As Agriculture Booms -Shreya Raman and Geeta Devi
-IndiaSpend.com The reverse migration sparked by the 2020 lockdown led to a drop in the demand for women farm workers who have few other job opportunities in villages Mumbai, Ayodhya, Mahoba: "A day's farm work pays about Rs 250 but women earn even less, sometimes around Rs 100. But now that those who work in the cities are back, women's daily earnings are almost down to Rs 50," said Kranti Azad, 27,...
More »How school closures have hurt our less fortunate students more -Rukmini S
-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...
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