Teachers in India carry on with lessons outdoors during lockdown

Out on a street in an Indian village, half a dozen children gather around their teacher who points a stick at the diagrams on a wall, one of many murals in the neighbourhood being used to help poor students keep up with their education during the coronavirus pandemic. With schools shut since March in a virus lockdown, teachers in Nilamnagar, western India, became concerned that some youngsters would fall behind because their families cannot afford an Internet subscription for online classes. So they came up with a workaround – children like playing on the streets, so they would take their lessons outside. “Since most of the families lack resources to educate their kids digitally, we had to come up with an innovative method to keep children invested in education, ” said Ram Gaikwad, a teacher at Asha Marathi Vidyalaya school.