Rashmi Misra
Founder, VIDYA

Rashmi Misra is founder-chairperson of Vidya Integrated Development for Youth and Adults (VIDYA, estb.1985), an NGO providing education, skills training, and healthcare to 15,000 underprivileged children and adults in New Delhi, Haryana, Mumbai/Pune and Bengaluru. It also runs the CBSE-affiliated VIDYA School, Gurugram (estb.2009) that provides free-of-charge English-medium K-12 education to 950 children from low-income households.

Most Vidya School children don’t have access to digital gadgets and Internet connectivity. How have you ensured learning continuity during the past year of schools closure?
The Covid-19 crisis has proved that the teachers’ community can adapt quickly to change. With limited resources, Vidya teachers overcame formidable odds to maintain learning continuity during these difficult times. One of our first initiatives last year was to launch a digital gadgets donation, collection and distribution drive to enable our students to access online classes. We were also helped by budli.in — a Bengaluru-based e-commerce company, which donated refurbished digital devices to us. A parallel initiative was to up-skill our teachers to conduct online classes.

For students who couldn’t attend online classes, worksheets were sent to their homes. Moreover since children’s families moved to their native villages during the pandemic, to we provided pre-recorded videos and assignments sent through WhatsApp.

Apart from Vidya School, Gurugram, how have you ensured continuation of Vidya’s other outreach programmes?
All told, VIDYA manages 79 projects in four states — Delhi, Haryana, Mumbai, Pune and Bengaluru. To maintain the momentum of these projects which directly educate and skill 15,000 individuals, we have equipped all of them with basic Smartphones/tablets, vaccinated 420 teachers and 1,000 staff members and enabled the vaccination of 4,000 parents. This required a sustained fund-raising drive in which we raised Rs.20 crore from corporates, trusts and philanthropists.

What’s your advice to under-funded schools and NGOs to maintain learning continuity during the pandemic?
Pull out all stops to introduce digitally-enabled blended learning in your classrooms and knowledge transmission workshops. Digital learning enables you to scale and reach larger numbers of learners, access wide-ranging content, enables independent self-learning, development of critical thinking skills, and teacher upgradation.

Should schools reopen now? How ready is the Vidya School, Gurugram and other Vidya institutions to conduct in-person classes?
Yes. It’s high time schools re-opened after the world’s longest lockdown. Vidya School, Gurugram has already started in-person education for class VI-XII children with strict Covid protocols because children learn best from teachers and peers. In our women’s education centres too, we have begun twice-a-week in-person instruction.

Future plans to deal with pandemic disruptions…
To prepare for future pandemic disruptions, we intend to equip all our beneficiaries with digital connectivity to ensure continuity of learning. Simultaneously, we are intensively training and upskilling our teachers. Moreover, in the broader community, we will continue with our vaccination drives, mental health and counseling programmes, and distribution of Covid care and ration kits to the poor.

What’s your advice to government to manage the current and future pandemic disruptions?
Government must find the resources to digitise all public schools as soon as possible and switch them to digitally-enabled blended learning while undertaking a nationwide teacher training drive.

NEP 2020 has strongly recommended liberal, holistic education with equal emphasis on developing life skills, co-curricular and sports education. The Covid crisis has taught us that teachers, parents, students can rise to meet all challenges. Government has the option of converting the Covid crisis into an opportunity to contemporise and revitalise Indian education.

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