Belthangady: Students build tent in forest to attend online classes

Belthangady: With schools and colleges shut since March, academics have been teaching online — a process that has raised serious questions. In parts of urban India, parents were happy when online lessons began after the March 25 nationwide lockdown was imposed by the government in view of the Covid-19 pandemic. But for most of the rural students, it poses a host of problems.

While online class is a change we have to adapt to, it puts people living in rural places at a disadvantage, owing to low Internet connectivity. Despite efforts by the government to seek out all options for online education, television classes via community radio, online education hasn’t received the desired response due to weak internet access in the remote areas of the state.

In one such case, a group of students in Perla village of Belthanday Taluk has built a tent for themselves in one of the nearby forest regions to attend online cases. The spot which they have chosen to build the tent is the only place near the village where they get a full-speed network.

The students who built the tent in a forest near Bykara include, Vikas Rao, a student of Alva’s Engineering College, Vishmitha, a 1st PU student of SDM PU college, Deepak Hebbar, a student of SDM Engineering College.

These students arrive at the tent in the morning at 9 am and stay there till 4 pm after finishing all the classes.

“Students in our village including me have problem in attending online class due to network issues. We request the authorities of the mobile network company install 4G networks,” said Vikas Rao, an engineering student.

Meanwhile, Lakshiminarayana Rao, a parent said, “We have built a tent in the forest area nearby to the children in our area so that they do not miss their class. We do not want the children to feel bad for missing classes.”