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...

India faced a second and worse wave of COVID-19 pandemic a few months back. The unemployment problem is looming large in the country. At this juncture, the country requires journalism to tell the stories of courage, of loss and grief and also of resilience, of the state of preparedness and about the efforts being made by communities, individuals, civil society and government. For better media coverage of critical issues like human...

-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...

-Newslaundry.com The data shows NewsX, News Nation and India News got more ad money than Republic and Times Now. But numbers released under the RTI Act tell another story. In February this year, the Directorate of Advertising and Visual Publicity, or DAVP, released data on the Narendra Modi government’s advertisement expenditure in the media. It shows that Republic TV and Times Now, the two most watched English news channels, received fewer government ads...