civil services chronicle

civil services chronicle

civil services chronicle Published this article page no  24 Investing in mental health According to estimates Rs 93000 crore will be needed to implement MHCA 2017. This could come from the PM Cares Fund corporate social responsibility initiatives private equity and perhaps a new national lottery.  Digitallymediated therapy and telepsychiatry should be scaled up. For eg NIMHANS runs a successful telepsychiatry intervention in Karnataka. Mental health startups and innovations that tap technologies like artificial intelligence machine learning and chatbots must be promoted for increasing awareness and access of services.  Building resilience amongst adolescents and young children A systemic approach is needed to build the demand for mental wellbeing just as we broadly introduced sports into schools in the late 1990s. For this Rashtriya Kishor Swasthya Karyakram (National Adolescent Health) programme has been reconfigured to include outreach by counsellors facilitybased counselling social and behavioural change. ELEARNING Why in news The lockdown due to COVID outbreak has altered the traditional teachinglearning mechanisms with the distinctive rise of elearning whereby teaching is undertaken remotely and on digital platforms. More on news  By the end of March 2020 over 180 countries had closed down schools affecting over 1.26 billion learners (as per UNESCO). India comprises over 320 million of these learners.  Educational institutions in India are using digital technologies to record video lectures of teachers provide notes and content related to the courses to students through email WhatsApp etc. facilitate teacherstudent interaction through platforms such as Zoom WebEx etc. Challenges with elearning  Digital Divide According to the Indicators of Household Social Consumption on Education in India report less than 15% of rural Indian households have Internet connection (as opposed to 42% urban Indian households). Those with no access to the internet are still excluded from quality learning. Further classes at times get disturbed due to connectivity issues. As per NSSO data only 4.4% of rural households and 23.4% of urban households have computerlaptop. Thus 75% of students are using smartphones to watch online classes. Teachers are apprehensive about students using smartphones because of distracting apps.  Difficult for parents to adjust to the online system. Parents complain of increased screen time for children arent comfortable with technology themselves and increased pressure from the added household work due to the absence of domestic help adds to their problem civil services chronicle buy. 

civil services chronicle