Lucknow, Sep 23 (UNI) Samajwadi Party (SP) president Akhilesh Yadav on Wednesday said that to ensure the continuity of education during the coronavirus crisis, the government should provide a smartphone, network and electricity to every student of poor families and also the teachers.
Free hardware should be provided for digital teaching at homes, he added.
In a statement, Mr Yadav questioned if the BJP government, which spent crores of publicity fund after putting up lakhs of LED TVs for its election rally, does not have funds to provide online education to students and teachers.
The BJP government should honestly make the PMCares Fund a public fund and worry about the future of the country, he said.
The former UP CM claimed that actually, even the online education system is a part of the BJP government's misleading policy. Students living in villages have issues related to electricity, there are network issues, the poor homes do not have laptops, smartphones.
There are even problems pertaining to livelihoods during lockdown. How will those, who have two-three kids, arrange for phones, laptops for every child? The BJP is adept at showing off, it runs away from the truth, he alleged.
The SP president said that in the education world these days, one of the more serious problems faced by parents is to pay the fees of school-colleges. 80 per cent efforts are being made by the parents in online education. Accordingly, school fees should not be more than 25 percent. However, the school-colleges still want to recover the full fees.
Managers of most educational institutions are working as business institutions. Anyway, the fees for online studies may not be equal to the fees for campus studies. The BJP government should issue guidelines in this regard, he averred.

UNI YK ASN 1856