Turn the Bus’s model of operation finds fuel in many incredibly talented and passionate volunteers all over the globe. Today’s photos in focus give you a glimpse into one of our Volunteers, Vikram.

Since the Turn the Bus program was launched in 2018, we have collaborated with the Bihar government and Jeevika, to pilot our program in the Champaran district of Bihar. However, since the past many months, our efforts have been directed towards the scaling up of the use of our EdTech app by high school students all over Bihar, going beyond our pilot districts to include the rest of the 38 districts in Bihar.

In March 2021, a group of 100 students was randomly selected out of a cohort of 800 who were a part of the pilot project to collect their feedback on the activities conducted as a part of the program. It was intended to follow this up with a detailed questionnaire to gather information about the students' scores to enable cross tabs and correlations of actual exam performance with feedback and engagement in the pilot activities.

The 26th of September of every year has been declared the ‘World Environmental Health Day’ by the International Federation of Environmental Health. This year, the IFEH has declared the theme as ‘Prioritizing Environmental Health for healthier communities in global recovery’, which places emphasis on recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic by increasing investments to avoid environmental degradation and pollution. Echoing the IFEH’s call to invest resources to promote a fairer, more sustainable global economy, Turn the Bus explores the scope of ‘green jobs’ in the global economy in this blog. 

The United Nations, in its observation of the week of International Day of Peace 2021 this year places emphasis on healing from the COVID-19 pandemic and calls for the world to collectively think about how we can recover better while building a more resilient, equitable, inclusive, sustainable, and healthier world. Turn the Bus, being an education- focused non- profit, takes this opportunity to reflect and think about the role of education in peace. 

The Bihar Rural Livelihoods Project (BRLP), colloquially known as JEEViKA, has been a face of change in Bihar in the past few years. The project was initiated by the Government of Bihar to alleviate poverty in the state and provide innovative models for sustainable and improved livelihood opportunities to rural households. This was aimed to achieve by mobilizing women from poorest households, into community institutions called self-help groups (SHGs).

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the socio- economic inequality throughout the globe, including access to education (via digital modes) in India. We have, in the past, touched upon this topic a few times already, but this blog highlights the lack of access in specific marginalised groups- the ‘Scheduled Tribes’, of India and introduces a recently signed Government program that aims to solve this problem. 

Current research is increasingly pointing out to the fact that digital access can reduce face-to-face barriers that women endure more than men.[1]

A BBC correspondent goes deep into the forests of the Anamalai Tiger Reserve in Tamil Nadu and finds a more majestic entity than the tiger- a cluster of students learning around a computer, with a teacher teaching them LIVE from 7000 miles away in New Zealand! This is eVidyaloka.

This friendship day, we want to talk about a space that has been dear to most of us reading this blog: schools. Apart from just being a place where knowledge is disseminated, schools are fundamental to one’s personal development, where most of us as children, interacted with peers and formed special interpersonal friendships.