– Baishali Mukherjee (Kolkata) West Bengal’s unprecedented eight-phase legislative assembly election ended on May 2 with a thumping third-time victory for the Trinamool Congress (TMC) and incumbent chief minister Mamata Banerjee, not necessarily in that order. Not only did the dream of the BJP led by star campaigners — prime minister Narendra Modi and Union home minister Amit Shah — of winning more than 200 of the 294 seats in the legislative assembly vanish in smoke, Banerjee’s TMC was swept back into office with 214 seats, three more than in 2016. This historic election was controversially held even as the Covid-19 pandemic was running riot statewide. On April 24, West Bengal (pop.91 million) reported 14,281 new Covid-19 cases and 59 deaths of which 20 were reported in Kolkata. Notably two TMC and one Congress candidate succumbed to the deadly virus while campaigning before the Election Commission — which has come in for scathing criticism from the judiciary — banned all mass rallies from April 12 onward. Amidst this chaos, public school education in the state has been hard hit. Though schools were partially reopened from February 12, the second pandemic wave of April has forced their shutdown again. On April 19, education minister Partha Chatterjee directed all government and government aided schools to close from April 20, bringing the summer vacation forward a month ahead of schedule. Thus far, the state government has not cancelled classes X and XII school-leaving exams of government schools. Now that the assembly election is over and Covid positive cases and fatalities are plateauing, they may be held in July, just before the start of the new academic year. Meanwhile, the pan-India CBSE and CISCE exam boards have cancelled their class X and postponed class XII exams. Even if not for law and order — widespread post-poll violence in the state has raised the shadow of President’s rule over West Bengal — Banerjee’s return to power in Writers Building, Kolkata augurs relatively well for the education sector. During her previous terms in office, the TMC government made a discernible effort to bring about the promised poribartan (change) in K-12 and higher education with several initiatives. The most successful among them is the Kanyashree scheme introduced in 2013, which provided adolescent girl children in the 13-19 age group three-tier scholarships of Rs.500 per year for continuing their education, a one[1]time payment of Rs.25,000 at age 18 and full tuition waiver for pursuing postgraduate college education. Initiatives in primary education include measures taken to ensure regular attendance of teachers in the state’s 92,000 government schools; opposing the no-detention (s.16) provision of the RTE Act, 2009 and inaugurating 100 English-medium government primaries in 19 districts of the state. Moreover, in the run-up to the legislative assembly election, Banerjee announced an array of schemes and recruitment drives in the education sector including transfer of Rs.10,000 to the bank accounts of 950,000 class XII students enrolled in 14,000 government and government-aided schools and 636 madrasas for buying smart phones or…
