‘Consider edu channel for differently abled’
MUMBAI: The Bombay high court on Monday asked the ministry of information and broadcasting and the National Council for Education, Research and Training (NCERT) to consider having dedicated television and radio channels for education, especially to cater to the needs of differently abled students who do not have access to education due to technological and mobile connectivity issues.
The court said since several regions have connectivity issues and students do not necessarily have smartphones to attend classes through online meeting platforms, and as most households had television and radio sets, the need of the hour was to fall back on past technologies to ensure that the differently abled students did not lose out on the academic year due to the Covid-19 pandemic. A division bench of chief justice Dipankar Datta and justice Girish Kulkarni was hearing a public interest litigation (PIL) filed by the National
Association for the Blind (NAB). During the hearing, advocate Uday Warunjikar, who represented the petitioner body, informed the bench that visually impaired students were deprived of education during the pandemic and the state and central governments should be directed to formulate policies to provide the same.
“We have dedicated TV channels that show live proceedings of Rajya Sabha and Lok Sabha and in the near future we may have live streaming of judicial proceedings too. Then why can’t there be devoted channels for education, not only for speciallyabled students but even for those who have suffered? We have to go back to old technology now,” the court observed. Officials from the NCERT were not immediately available for a response.