More than 72 lakh teachers have been sensitised to inclusive education through a nationwide initiative involving over 60,000 schools, the Union Ministry of Education announced on October 8. The initiative uses PRASHAST, a digital platform developed to help schools identify children who may have disabilities and require further assessment.

The Department of School Education and Literacy has been conducting the sensitisation drive for three months. The 30-minute orientation module aims to help teachers and other school personnel recognise the needs of children with special needs and create safer, more accessible learning environments.

The announcement concerns the reach of the sensitisation module. It does not establish how many children have been screened or how many have been referred for professional assessment.

Schools Need a Standardised Screening Tool

Children’s disabilities do not always have visible signs. Difficulties with reading, writing, communication, hearing, mobility or social interaction may indicate a need for additional support, but these observations alone cannot establish a disability.

The National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) developed PRASHAST, short for Pre-Assessment Holistic Screening Tool, to give schools a structured way to identify children who may need further evaluation.

The tool covers all 21 disability conditions recognised under the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (RPwD) Act, 2016. These include conditions relating to vision, hearing, speech and language, locomotor disabilities, intellectual disability, specific learning disabilities, autism spectrum disorder and mental illness, among others.

Before the introduction of a uniform checklist, schools lacked a common screening framework covering all 21 conditions. PRASHAST was developed to help teachers use their regular interactions with students to flag possible concerns systematically.

The tool is aligned with the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, the Right to Education Act, 2009, and the inclusive education objectives of the Samagra Shiksha programme.

How PRASHAST Works

PRASHAST uses a two-part checklist to separate initial classroom observations from the second-stage review. Part 1: Screening by regular teachers. Class and subject teachers use the first checklist to record observable indicators that may suggest a disability. The checklist is designed to use accessible language rather than rely heavily on medical terminology.

The screening is intended to draw on observations made over time and in different situations. The NCERT guidelines specify that children should be observed for a considerable period, with a minimum of 15 days indicated for the second-stage review, across settings such as classrooms, playgrounds and other school activities.

Part 2: Review by special educators. Special educators, counsellors or other designated personnel review the first-stage observations and conduct a second-level screening. This helps validate the initial findings and tentatively identify the disability category that may require further assessment.

The digital platform can generate school-level reports that can be shared with the relevant authorities to facilitate follow-up, including assessment and disability certification under the applicable procedures. PRASHAST is a preliminary screening tool, not a diagnostic test. A child flagged by the checklist does not automatically have a disability. Formal assessment by qualified professionals is necessary to establish a diagnosis and determine the support required.

What the Sensitisation Module Covers

The latest nationwide drive extends beyond classroom teachers. The Ministry’s 30-minute module is designed for special educators, school heads and non-teaching personnel, including transport drivers, clerical staff, receptionists and wardens.

It uses practical examples and interactive activities to help school personnel understand children’s needs and adopt appropriate, respectful practices. The module is available in 12 Indian languages, according to the Ministry.

This wider participation matters because inclusion depends on more than classroom instruction. A child with a mobility impairment may face barriers in accessing school facilities, while a child with hearing difficulties may need adjustments to classroom communication. Staff responsible for transport, administration and other school services also influence whether children can participate safely and independently.

Sensitisation can help school personnel respond more appropriately to these needs. However, awareness training alone cannot provide the specialist support, accessible infrastructure or individual accommodations that some children require.

What the law requires schools to recognise

The Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016, provides the legal framework for recognising 21 specified disability conditions and protecting the rights of persons with disabilities. Its provisions include obligations relating to inclusive education and access to educational opportunities.

The National Education Policy 2020 also emphasises equitable access to education, including support for children with disabilities and specific learning disabilities. Early identification can help schools and families seek appropriate educational adjustments, specialist services and formal assessment.

PRASHAST supports this process by giving schools a common starting point. Its role is to flag possible needs and facilitate referrals, rather than replace medical or psychological evaluation.

The test is what happens after identification

The Ministry’s announcement establishes the scale of the sensitisation exercise, but it does not provide figures on the number of children screened through PRASHAST, the number of cases referred for assessment or the number who subsequently received support.

These are important measures of the initiative’s impact. Teacher awareness can help bring previously overlooked needs to attention, but children benefit only when schools can act on those observations.

That requires access to special educators, clear referral procedures, coordination with families and qualified professionals, and appropriate classroom support. Schools also need to handle screening information confidentially and avoid labelling children on the basis of preliminary observations.

The nationwide training drive broadens awareness of inclusive education across India’s schools. Its longer-term value will depend on whether that awareness translates into timely assessments and meaningful support for children who need it.

For 466 million children, a school meal depends on a workforce of about 7.4 million people who prepare, cook and serve it. Much of that work is done by women, yet the people behind the meal often remain outside the way school systems measure and value their workforce.

A global survey cited in a new report by the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) found that in one out of every three school meal programmes, the majority of cooks and caterers are unpaid. At least three-quarters of these workers are women.

The finding places school kitchens within a much wider problem in food systems: work associated with feeding and caring for people is frequently treated as low-value labour, even when public services depend on it.

The Workforce Behind the Plate

Preparing a school meal involves much more than cooking. Food has to be procured, prepared in large quantities, cooked safely, portioned and served on time. Kitchens have to be cleaned and supplies managed. The work has to happen every school day.

Yet cooking and catering are among the jobs most closely associated with women’s unpaid responsibilities at home. The IPES-Food report estimates that women undertake 76% of unpaid care work globally. This includes cooking, cleaning, family caregiving and food provisioning. Women spend an average of 4 hours and 25 minutes a day on these activities, compared with 1 hour and 23 minutes for men.

That division follows women into paid employment. The report identifies cooks, cleaners and caterers as care-coded occupations that are overwhelmingly filled by women and systematically underpaid. School food brings this contradiction into a public institution. Work that would be recognised as labour in a factory or office can still be treated as an extension of domestic responsibility when it involves feeding people.

School Meals: Organised Differently

Countries have taken different approaches to the role of food and the people who prepare it. In Japan, shokuiku, or food education, places school caterers within children’s food learning. The role extends beyond preparing lunch and becomes part of how children understand food.

Brazil’s National School Feeding Programme, known as PNAE, incorporates feminist and agroecological principles. The IPES-Food report highlights the programme as an example of efforts to resist outsourcing and the intensification of school food work.

Kenya has focused on strengthening the role of workers and communities. Its School Meals Coalition has mobilised more than $24 million to support worker agency and community leadership. In South Korea, a grassroots coalition of civil society organisations campaigned for universally free and environmentally friendly school meals under public leadership.

The approaches differ, but they share an important feature: the school meal is treated as part of a public system rather than simply as a service that needs to be delivered at the lowest possible cost.

School Food Becomes a Contract

That distinction becomes particularly significant when school meals are outsourced. The IPES-Food report describes school feeding as a potential battleground for privatisation. Where school food jobs become better valued and salaries rise, they can become attractive targets for outsourcing.

The report cites global catering companies including Sodexo, Compass Group and Aramark and says outsourcing of school and university meal management has, in the cases it examines, been associated with job cuts and reductions in wages and benefits. The pressure to reduce the cost of a meal can therefore affect the person preparing it.

Catering unions, workers, parents and community groups have resisted this model in different places. The report points to growing recognition of locally controlled school meal programmes and their potential to keep care work within the public and community sphere.

This also changes what counts as an efficient school meal programme. A cheaper contract may reduce the visible cost of providing food, while shifting the pressure onto wages, job security and working conditions.

India’s Millions of School Meal Workers

India’s PM POSHAN programme provides one of the largest examples of a publicly supported school meal workforce. More than 24 lakh cook-cum-helpers work across the programme, with women making up more than 90% of them. The central government provides an honorarium of ₹1,000 a month for 10 months of the year, while states and Union territories can supplement the amount.

India’s cook-cum-helpers are not unpaid, so they should not be directly counted against the IPES-Food finding that the majority of cooks and caterers are unpaid in one out of three school meal programmes. Their employment arrangement is different: they receive an honorarium and are not regular school employees.

The scale of the workforce, however, shows why the question of how school food labour is valued matters. More than two million people, overwhelmingly women, are needed to prepare meals for children across the country. Their work is essential to the programme, but their employment status places them outside the regular teaching and administrative workforce that usually defines a school.

That gap between importance and recognition is visible across countries. Some systems have tried to build school meals into education, nutrition and community policy. Others have left the people doing the work in low-paid, unpaid or outsourced positions. For the children receiving the meal, the difference may be invisible. For the workers preparing it, it determines whether feeding children is recognised as a job with value, rights and protections.

Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai share the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering how to make a chemical reaction favour one mirror-image molecule over its twin — a problem that had puzzled chemists since the 19th century.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on Wednesday that the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry will be shared by Henri B. Kagan of Université Paris-Sud in France and Kenso Soai of Tokyo University of Science in Japan, honouring work that explains one of chemistry’s oldest unsolved riddles: why living things are built almost entirely from one version of certain molecules, when chemistry itself has no obvious reason to prefer it.

The Academy cited the pair “for the discovery of non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis.”

2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry: The Mystery of Left and Right

The puzzle at the heart of the prize concerns a property chemists call chirality. Many molecules essential to life — amino acids among them — exist in two forms that are mirror images of each other, much like a person’s left and right hands. The two versions contain exactly the same atoms, arranged in exactly the same way, except reversed. Yet biology is overwhelmingly one-handed: proteins in the human body are built almost exclusively from a single mirror-image form of amino acids, a property scientists call homochirality, from the Greek words for “same” and “hand.” Its mirror twin is almost absent from nature.

For most of the history of chemistry, that imbalance was impossible to reproduce in a laboratory. When chemists ran reactions designed to create chiral molecules, they got a near-perfect fifty-fifty mixture of both mirror forms every time — a far cry from the near-total one-sidedness found in living cells. That gap mattered well beyond academic curiosity: in medicine, where a drug’s two mirror-image forms can behave completely differently in the body, only one version typically produces the intended therapeutic effect, while the other can be useless or, in some cases, harmful. Producing a single mirror image cleanly, rather than a mixture, became one of the central technical challenges in modern pharmaceutical chemistry.

Kagan and Soai, working years apart, each supplied a piece of the solution.

In 1986, Kagan discovered a new way of steering asymmetric chemical reactions that allowed chemists to generate a far greater excess of one mirror-image molecule than had previously seemed achievable — a technique that reshaped how chemists thought about controlling chirality in the lab.

Soai built on that foundation from a different angle. In a landmark 1995 paper, he described the first chemical reaction with the theoretical potential to become fully homochiral — one mirror image reinforcing its own production through autocatalysis, a process in which a reaction’s product accelerates further reactions of the same kind. It took him until 2003 to actually demonstrate it: a reaction that produced only one of the two possible mirror-image molecules, with none of the other detectable at all. Outside of biology itself, nobody had managed that before.

“Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai have provided a solution to a chemical mystery that is over a century old: how homochirality can emerge spontaneously. The chemical reactions they have developed are spectacular,” said Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, announcing the award.

The Academy said the discoveries have become decisive tools for chemists designing the reactions used to manufacture pharmaceuticals, where isolating a single mirror-image compound, rather than settling for a mixture, can determine whether a drug works safely at all.

Kagan and Soai will share the prize sum, along with the gold medal and diploma traditionally presented at the Nobel ceremony in Stockholm in December.