Govt. toughens stand against unvaccinated teachers
The Hindu
Children’s safety our priority: Minister
The State Government has toughened its stand against teaching and non-teaching staff in schools who are yet to be vaccinated against COVID-19.
Nearly 5,000 teaching and non-teaching staff in the State are estimated to be unvaccinated though schools reopened on November 1.
Minister for General Education V. Sivankutty told The Hindu that teachers were role models and the Government took a serious view of their refusal to get vaccinated as it affected society as a whole. “There are around 1.6 lakh schoolteachers in the State. A minority among them are yet to take their vaccines. This cannot be accepted. The guidelines for school reopening stipulated that teachers should get their COVID-19 shots. Vaccination is especially important as the Government is considering resuming full-fledged classes in schools in a week or two, and concerns over the emerging new COVID-19 variant. We need to be extremely vigilant.”
Aasheesh Pittie says birdwatching is not very unlike hunting, except that nothing is killed. “You track… you want to follow the bird… see it,” he says about this activity that he has pursued for nearly fifty years. Pittie, the editor of the ornithological journal Indian Birds, author of many classic reference books about birds and most recently, a collection of bird essays titled The Living Air: Pleasures of Birds and Birdwatching, was speaking at an event organised by the Archives of the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS).