India’s prolonged 82 weeks lockdown of schools from pre-primary onward is unprecedented in history. Even during the Spanish flu of 1918-20 which took a toll of 18 million lives, schools did not shut down for more than 20 weeks. Extraordinary challenges require extraordinary response – Summiya Yasmeen The latest diktats of several state governments, especially the Delhi state government to lock down schools for the fifth time since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020, has belatedly provoked public indignation. Suddenly, hitherto oblivious television news channels, the mainstream print and social media have awoken to the plight of the world’s largest child and youth population (500 million) which has endured 82 weeks of education lockdown — the most prolonged of any country worldwide. Belatedly, the woke middle class is questioning the logic of all other sectors of the economy — industry, trade, travel and tourism, malls, cinemas and restaurants — allowed to resume business while schools remain under tight lockdown. Although your editors have been strenuously advocating reopening of the nation’s classrooms for over a year, EducationWorld has been a lone voice in the wilderness. Last July in a comprehensive cover feature titled ‘Why Schools Should Reopen Right Now!’ Your editors made a strong case for restarting 1.4 million anganwadis/preschools and 1.5 million schools countrywide. It’s pertinent to note that in India schools have shut down in-class learning for 82 weeks; in worse-hit UK they closed for 27 weeks, 12 in France and 27 in China (see box p.57). Although many countries restarted schools after brief lockdowns, India’s Central and state governments have remained indifferent to the huge learning loss suffered by the country’s vulnerable children. This despite numerous scientific studies highlighting that children are least susceptible to Coronavirus infection (the rate of hospitalisation of school-age children due to Covid infection is 1 in 100,000 — Dr. Joseph Allen, Harvard University) and shuttering schools has negligible effect on limiting the spread of the pandemic (WHO). Astonishingly, the country’s Central and 29 state governments have remained impervious to numerous studies of international agencies including Unicef and Unesco, which have repeatedly warned against alarming accumulating learning loss of children because of the protracted lockdown of education institutions, especially preschools and primaries. The warning of foreign agencies apart, even studies and surveys of domestic institutions such as Pratham Education Foundation, CRY and Azim Premji University, Bengaluru (APU) have been disregarded. A substantial share of the blame for this grave national error of judgement must also accrue to the country’s influential middle class which foolishly believes that expensive digital technologies insulate their progeny against learning loss. Simultaneously, for months the mainstream media paid no attention to EducationWorld’s whistle-blowing, which all dailies and periodicals zealously ignore. Finally on January 4, 700 days after all education institutions countrywide were first ordered to lock down in March 2020, National Coalition on Education Emergency, a pan-India alliance of individuals, organisations and networks, issued a statement censuring government for the prolonged closure of schools and education institutions…
