tOn Thursday, August 3, Haryana Education Minister Kanwar Pal said students of the state government schools who will plant a tree when they are in Class XI and nurture it till Class XII would receive an additional 1 to 5 marks in their Class XII. In this regard, a detailed proposal will soon be notified, he added.
Giving more details, he said these marks are to be awarded on the basis of the health of the planted tree. As per an official statement, the minister said this practice aims to foster social responsibility among students towards the environment.
The minister was presiding over a meeting of school education officers at Shiksha Sadan in Panchkula. Further, he directed Forest Department officers to ensure the availability of the plants at the schools. He said the Director School Education Department should appoint liaisoning officers in each school to coordinate with forest department officers.
There are around 1.93 lakh students studying across the state in Class IX, he informed. During the meeting, the minister was apprised of the few cases of mobile device management software violations in tablets given to students by the Haryana government, as stated in a report by PTI.
Pal was informed that by breaking this software, a student gets access to all websites and contents, which was previously restricted to education-based websites. Following this, he directed officers to identify these students and take stringent action and instructed officers to withdraw tablets from their possession at the earliest.
The minister further said that though the cases of software breaking in tablets are less than 0.5 per cent of the overall distributed tablets, still a strong message should reach students in order to avoid any mishandling in the future.
Additionally, he appealed to the parents to keep a check on their children while they are using tablets. He directed the officers to keep a strict vigil on such cases so that these numbers do not increase in the future.
Pal said, "Our aim is to bridge the gaps" in digital learning for the majority of students studying in government schools who hail from economically weaker and deprived sections and cannot afford devices like smartphones and tablets. The Haryana government has distributed free tablets to students of Classes X to XII of government schools.
