Azim Premji voices concerns against idea of promoting students to next class

Azim Premji termed the Covid-19 pandemic as a once-a-century event which led the people and the institutions to take it as a challenge and fight it with all the resources.

Azim Premji, the founder-chairman of IT major Wipro voiced his concern against the idea of promoting school students to the next class and stressed the need for adequate attention towards lost schooling days owing to the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) pandemic.

Azim Premji said close to 83 lakh people in rural communities and vulnerable areas revived their livelihoods through field interventions (Reuters)

"The worst thing that we could do is to ignore the past one and a half years and just keep promoting children to the next class without helping them to learn what they should have learnt. We can create an enormous deficit which can never be filled up otherwise," he said while speaking at the foundation day event of the Bombay Chartered Accountants' Society, according to news agency PTI.

The Wipro chairman said a graded approach such as the one that involves conducting classes in open areas in neighbourhoods, vaccinating teachers against Covid-19 and re-engineering education programmes is the need of the hour to ensure that the lost schooling time over the past one and half years is covered.

Wipro's philanthropic arm has committed an additional ₹1,000 crore of grants over and above the ₹1,125-crore support it had announced in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic last year. Premji said that the additional grant will be directed primarily on universal vaccination.

He said close to 83 lakh people in rural communities and vulnerable areas revived their livelihoods through field interventions like seed and fertiliser supply for farmers and working capital for poultry farmers and handicraft industry through the help of its foundation.