Education in Backward Areas

Covid-19 was an unprecedented crisis across the world and has affected all the countries. The pandemic has led to severe disruption in normal life, including the closure of schools.

Education is in the concurrent list of the Constitution and the majority of the schools are under the domain of respective State and UT Governments. However, in order to ensure that every student including those residing in rural and educationally backward districts of the country, gets continued access to education, a multi-pronged approach has been adopted. A comprehensive initiative called PM e-VIDYA has been initiated as part of Atma Nirbhar Bharat Abhiyan on 17^th May 2020, which unifies all efforts related to digital/online/on-air education to enable multi-mode access to education. The initiative includes:

• DIKSHA (one nation, one digital platform) is the nation’s digital infrastructure for providing quality e-content for school education in states/UTs and QR-coded Energized Textbooks for all grades are available on it. 35 of the 36 states and UTs have onboarded on the DIKSHA platform and contextualized the content as per the local need.
• One earmarked Swayam Prabha TV channel per class from Class 1 to 12 (one class, one channel).
• Extensive use of Radio, Community radio, and CBSE Podcast- Shiksha Vani.
• Special e-content for visually and hearing impaired developed on Digitally Accessible Information System (DAISY) and in sign language on NIOS website/YouTube.

Further, an Alternate Academic Calendar has been prepared for providing learning solutions for grades 1 to 12 and ‘Students’ Learning Enhancement Guidelines’ prepared by NCERT suggest models for the following three types of scenarios to ensure that no child is deprived of reach of education:

a)         Learning Enhancement during COVID-19 for students without digital devices;

b)         Learning Enhancement during COVID-19 for students with limited access to digital devices &

c)         Learning Enhancement during COVID-19 for students with digital devices.

Also, PRAGYATA guidelines were issued to States/UTs to facilitate continued education through various modes. The guidelines inter-alia includes situations where internet connectivity is not available or available with very little bandwidth where resources are shared through various platforms like television, radio, etc that do not depend on the internet.

Besides, the Ministry has undertaken a proactive initiative, named, ‘MANODARPAN’ covering a wide range of activities to provide psychosocial support to students, teachers, and families for Mental Health and Emotional Wellbeing during the COVID outbreak and beyond.

The Ministry had conducted a survey in the month of July 2020 with the help of Kendriya Vidyalaya Sangathan (KVS), Navodaya Vidyalaya Samiti (NVS), and the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) to understand the scenario of Online Learning of school students in COVID-19 pandemic situation. The details of the survey and findings are given in Chapter – 3 of the Learning Enhancement guidelines, which may be accessed at the following links:

1.  https://www.education.gov.in/sites/upload_files/mhrd/files/Learning_Enhancement_0.pdf

2. https://seshagun.gov.in/sites/default/files/update/Learning_Enhancement.pdf

3. https://ncert.nic.in/pdf/announcement/Learning_%20Enhancement_Guidelines.pdf

National Achievement Survey (NAS) is conducted to enable States/UTs to identify gaps in learning outcomes and take remedial steps. NAS 2021 has been conducted on 12^th November 2021.

The Central Government is constantly advising States/UTs through guidelines and meetings with respect to interventions for reducing the impact of pandemics on education. The guidelines issued so far are given below: