The phrase, ‘closing the digital divide’ has gained currency during the Covid-19 lockdown, where we inhabit the online world more than ever before. What this phrase means, used often in the context of schools and education, is to give economically disadvantaged students devices like smartphones, access to computers, WiFi and bring some academic parity between them and the more privileged students.

There are students from homes who cannot even dream of smartphones. For them, basic stationery like ball pens, notebooks, pencils, scales, crayons remain out of reach. These are students from Below Poverty Line (BPL) families, and, “we are working towards making stationery accessible to them, as they currently study from home,” said activist Subhajit Mukherjee. Mukherjee is the mover and shaker behind an initiative called pen4cause — an effort to collect one billion ball pens to donate to students from BPL families.