Monday, May 20

PRASHAST By NCERT: An App To Promote Inclusive Education For Disabled Students

Edited by Meenu Mathew
PRASHAST By NCERT: An App To Promote Inclusive Education For Disabled Students

The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) has recently introduced a mobile application, called PRASHAST (Pre-Assessment Holistic Screening Tool) as an innovative measure to digitally screen the students for possible disabilities, at the school level. The project comes under the patronage of Department of School Education and Literary within the Union Ministry of Education.

The application enhances the inclusivity of educational system, by identifying and incorporating specific needs and requirements of the students who are specially-abled. The platform will digitally screen such students, providing a comprehensive assessment of their abilities and areas of interest and those needed special attention and improvement.

The application is available in Android Play Store and can be downloaded free. As it mentions in the description section, PRASHAST resolves the lack of a uniform disability screening checklist for schools and covers 21 sort of disabilities according to the RPWD (The Rights of Persons with Disabilities) Act of 2016. It has the capacity to create school-level reports after screening the 21 disability conditions. The reports can be shared with concerned authorities for initiating the certification process. The certification process follows the guidelines of Samagra Shiksha – a flagship integrated program for school and teacher education under the Department of School Education and Literacy, Ministry of Education, Government of India.

The application has over 5 lakh downloads now, and is available in 23 languages (22 languages included in the VIII Schedule of our constitution), considering the easy access of teachers, special educators and school heads.