Editor,
The second Covid wave has receded from most parts of the country, except a few regions, Meghalaya being one of them. Despite severe lockdowns and restrictions for over two months, it is not immediately clear how our state is still seeing 400 to 500 daily cases. In pursuit of transparency, I request the Health Department to shed light on the current situation instead of merely supplying daily statistics. What are the sources of infection for the cases over the past few weeks? How many cases are attributable to new entrants to the state, and their contacts? Is contact tracing and micro-containment not adequate to control the spread? Are there any specific activities that correlate strongly to the continued spread – based on rational scientific analysis? It would greatly help the public to know how these cases are coming up consistently, so that we may take adequate preventive measures.
With regards to the ongoing vaccination efforts, it is an indisputable fact that we are unlikely to see complete normalcy without mass vaccination. With slow vaccination progress, the entire state is likely to be under extended restrictions for the upcoming months, if not years – unless things change! Given the vaccine hesitation, the government should disseminate daily data on the percentage of vaccinated persons (either partial or complete) with regards to the new cases, hospitalisations and deaths. This should help the public at large make informed choices based on the probabilities of Covid consequences for each vaccination status. At some point the government should be decisive enough to remove most intra-state restrictions and allow the non-vaccinated citizens to deal with the consequences, if any, of their own choice – rather than continue with restrictions that severely affect the lives of ALL common citizens, including the vaccinated segments. If someone can decide for themselves as per the law on vaccination, then why does the government have to play such a protective parental role on behalf of adult citizens? Give people freedom and let them handle the responsibilities of freedom – this notion is the very essence of a sovereign democracy, and the government is requested to respect this.
At this point, with vaccines available to the willing, no one in the state will have a strong base to criticise the government for covid consequences if restrictions are lowered – hence this must be considered strongly.
Lastly, the government is requested to evaluate specific targeted restrictions to combat Covid instead of freedom-crippling measures. The new restrictions of night curfews and Sunday curfews are a shot in the dark. Is there a verifiable connection between Covid spread and night time hours? Would these curfews curtail Covid spread if the markets and businesses are allowed to open across the other six days of the week? Is the government acting in the best interests of its citizens when it constantly adds blanket restrictions? Even with vaccination being freely available – when will this lockdown state of life end?
These are questions we all have to ponder upon as we sit locked up in our houses during the upcoming curfew hours and days.
Yours etc.,
Joe Lyngdoh,
Via email
Hikai – a headache for teachers
Editor,
My son brags about our download speed and tells me that he downloaded a game from Steam and the max downloading speed was 25Mbps! I am astounded by this and think deeply about his life and compare it to the life of our maid servant’s daughter who goes to a state government school in Police Bazar. Our maid has a monthly income of Rs 15000 out of which she has to educate her child and also look after the family. She is a widow and the only income source for her family. Her husband passed away in 2018 and since then she is the sole earning member for the family.
A ‘Device Availability Survey’ conducted by the Ministry for Education revealed that only 2.51% of government school students had access to a computer or a laptop. Students having tablets are confined to 0.89% and smart-phones with internet connection to 47.98% while 10.42% of the students have access to a smartphone without internet connection.
Now with these insights let me come to our beloved Shillong and talk about the sorry state it is in because of this digital divide. In this specific school, that my maid servant’s daughter attends, teachers and students are compelled to utilize an internet learning gateway called HIKAI by the school management of Ramakrishna Mission, Cherrapunji. Having gone through the interface of HIKAI, I find it admirable. The interface is at par with online learning portals used in schools and universities abroad. There are resources which teachers can update and ask the students to read and study; there are drop-boxes assigned to each student for them to submit their assignments which only the teacher has access to and then grades them accordingly.
However, there is a huge gap in the execution of the learning gateway. What the administration needs to understand is that students attending this school are not at all from an economically strong background. They all do not have stable internet connection; also their parents have only a single smart phone so how does the administration expect students to gain access to this portal? Not only that but proper technical knowledge is also not given to the students so that they can gain access to the portal and reap its benefit.
My maid servant has one smart phone and one regular feature phone. She tells me her monthly expenditure due to this pandemic has also increased as she has to recharge her smart phone with data packs quite often. Earlier, she could subsist for an entire month with a Rs 100 top -up for talk time; now she has to recharge a minimum of Rs. 250 for a 50 GB monthly plan or an unlimited plan of Rs. 128 or so for 28 days. At least her daughter is lucky and we help her whenever she needs some help uploading an assignment to HIKAI. But not all are as fortunate as she is. I have heard from teachers of that school that students ask their tuition teachers to rent out their smart phones so that they can send pictures of their assignment to the class WhatsApp group that the teachers have created.
This process of uploading documents to the portal should have been done by the students but since the students of the school are not instructed on how to use the HIKAI portal interface, all of the uploading has to be done by teachers now. It is truly distressing not only for the parents and the students but also for the teachers. Teachers get something like 35 to 40 raw images of the assignments per class depending on the number of classes they teach and have to convert those to PDF format and then upload to the students’ account themselves.
I spoke to one of teachers in this school and he disclosed to me about the amount of stress he has to go through everyday due to HIKAI. He said he had to create about 50 odd accounts for each of the students in his class each having a user ID and a password. He additionally disclosed that he gets in excess of 100 pictures in his WhatsApp class groups that he has to process and convert to PDFs and then upload to each account of these students. He finds it really distressing as he has to stay up late into the night to complete this task.
Even though HIKAI has the potential to be a fascinating educational portal, its implementation leaves much to be desired. Proper checks and balances are not in place. The fact that the administration pressurizes teachers to maintain 80% submission rate is meaningless as the proper enforcement of Education is missing. Whether the administration checks the contents in these assignments or just checks the statistical data is something to ponder upon.
Yours etc.,
Dushyant Wadhwan
Via email