Prakash Javadekar, our Human Resource Development minister, recently wrote to all the states, imploring them to address the issue of five lakh vacant posts in government schools. The officials of the ministry cited that raising the quality of education is a ‘distant dream’ if the manpower remains dismal. Taking things into their own hands to inch closer to this dream is Meghshala, an organisation which empowers government school teachers with lesson plans to create a learning experience for students.
Speaking on the same issue as Javadekar, Ullas Kumar, Vice President Operations, says that even if the teachers are trained and given resources they go back to teaching by reading from textbooks, which they are not happy about. So Meghshala installs an app on their smartphone loaded with teaching kits, available in both English and Kannada. “Say there are ten chapters in a class V math book, each chapter taking three hours to complete, thus taking 30 hours to finish the book. We give them 30 multimedia lessons, of about 40 minutes each,” explains Kumar, emphasising that these kits contain activities, open-ended questions, pictures, graphics, flowcharts, and more. “Out of 300 teachers, as many as 55 teachers have seen more than 36,000 pages on the product,” says Kumar.
While talking more numbers with founder Jyoti Thyagarajan, who started the organisation back in 2013, she says, “About 40 per cent of people are from the lower socio-economic group and if we don’t educate them they will never beat poverty.”
Reach out: meghshala.org