Rajya Sabha MP and senior RJD leader Manoj K Jha in a letter to Education Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank has urged him to resume the offline classes in universities, arguing that the students are losing out in terms of access to the library and other practical learning tools.
Mr. Jha said that the students and teachers have been attempting to salvage learning through the online interactions over ‘inadequate devices, datapacks and unstable connections”. But the majority of the students have no access at all. “Their personal circumstances are just not supportive of formal learning, especially for women, disabled and other students from disadvantaged backgrounds,” he wrote. Mr. Jha is a professor at the Delhi University and continues to teach there.
For the average Indian student university life is not only about classes and laboratories. It is about the access to books that they cannot dream of outside the libraries. It is equally about building social capital and networks for self-development that can prove invaluable for the students in future, he said.
“Keeping such a valuable human capacity cooped up away from university campuses is a massive national waste. Any further complacency in this regard will be damaging for generations,” he said. He requested the Education Minister to come with a health protocol to open up the physical classes while managing COVID-19 pandemic.
