No Child Left Behind

Built to bridge the learning divide worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic, this e-learning resource is an effective, inclusive option for all children

- Naorem Anuja

FOR GOVERNMENT SCHOOL teachers like 36-year-old Hidayatulla Barkatulla Khatik, from Jalgaon, Maharashtra, the shift to digital learning necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic added another set of challenges to an already difficult job. "Many government school students come from homes deprived of basic resources. For these children, access to a device with enough internet data to attend live online classes was impossible. Of 50 students from my class, only four or five of them were able to be online for classes over Zoom. We needed a solution that could reach kids who were being left behind."

Khatik is among 2,000 Zilla Parishad teachers in Maharashtra, who are part of VSchool-a website and later an app created by Vowels of the People Association (VOPA), an organization working to provide accessible, free and high-quality ed-tech interventions, to children from low-income households.

VSchool and VOPA, according to 33-year-old founder Prafulla Shashikant, "were both born out of need." A mechanical engineer by training, Shashikant was spearheading Kumar Nirman, an initiative involving value education of school children and young adults under the aegis of NIRMAN (founded by Padma Shri Dr Abhay Bang) when he realized that the young adults he worked with very often came from elite institutions or homes with a certain measure of social and cultural capital. "I wanted to work with adults with the same zeal but lacking similar opportunities." With that design in mind, Shashikant quit NIRMAN and started VOPA in 2018 with support from, now executive director, Rutuja Jeve, and his wife, Shilpa Hulsurkar.