When will children in India get inoculated against COVID-19? It could be as early as August 2021, if the health minister Mansukh Mandaviya is to be believed.He said this at a recent BJP parliamentary party meeting.There are concerns about the impact of an impending third wave on children.A vaccine would enable the reopening of schools and the resumption of outdoor activities. A timeline for September had been given earlier according to data from clinical trials of Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin. 

According to 2018 estimates, India has onl 2,967 tigers. Have you ever wondered how does one count tigers? What systems and mechanisms are used? How reliable are the numbers that are finally estimated and released? Most importantly, why do we count tigers? We invite children and teachers to a special Young Environmentalist MasterClass on the subject of counting of tigers with one of India’s foremost wildlife experts, Qamar Qureshi of the Wildlife Institute of India.

Chintu and Chinki were excited to go out for their summer vacations. They were bored of staying at home all through the lockdown. Since their grandparents lived nearby, they had planned to visit their village Tikli. Chintu and Chinki had done all their packing and rode off with their Mom and Dad to the village. As they came close to Tikli, they saw some women carrying pots of water on their heads, walking on the roadside...

Last year, when the lockdown was announced nationwide, I felt very excited at the thought of not going to school anymore and getting a break from studies. I had thought that this would go on for a couple of days and once the situation becomes better, everything would be back to normal. But then, the days turned into months, and I never expected it to go on for a whole year!

Attend classes, study, eat, sleep, then rinse and repeat. Sounds peaceful, doesn’t it? It sure did to me, at least in the first few weeks of lockdown. Though now, instead of the noisy interruptions by many loud students, my classes are punctuated by silence.

‘All’s well that ends well.’My lockdown experience is the exact opposite of this commonly used quote from the famous play by William Shakespeare. My first reaction:When I got to know about the lockdown in the entire country, I got excited thinking that I will get more time to spend with my family, more time for TV, and no more school! Most of my friends felt the same way.

We all like pandas, don’t we? Those cute furry little creatures with big shiny eyes who do nothing all day but roll on the grass and munch on bamboos! But unfortunately, pandas live mainly in temperate forests, high in the mountains of southwest China, or in the zoos in which your parents will never take you because they’re six hours away from your house. I mean, why go to the zoo when you can solve 15 math problems from RD Sharma in those six hours and actually be ‘productive’ in that time!?

I blinked in confusion, “Psychics, yet again!” As I kept jotting down notes in my copy, I started another episode of daydreams in my mind. My friend messaged me in between asking, "Hey, which page is Ma'am teaching?" I frowned. "Maybe 39 or 40," I replied. I missed my friend because, in school, we never talked about which chapter we were being taught or what books we should bring...