The balance between children’s safety against the Covid-19 pandemic and their right to protect their future livelihoods needs to be restored. The national interest demands no more time is lost in restarting India’s long shuttered schools with adequate safety protocols, writes Dilip Thakore Loss of lives and livelihoods has been the focus of official and media attention for the past 15 months since the deadly novel Coronavirus began to spread countrywide in March 2020. However beyond official declarations and media headlines, 21st century India’s already ramshackle education system that has long under-served the world’s largest child and youth community estimated at a massive 500 million, has suffered further damage. Now, even as the national drive to vaccinate 1.3 billion citizens against the malignant virus is gathering momentum and daily infections and fatalities have declined from a peak of 412,000 and 3,980 on May 6 to 48,786 and 1,005 currently, this is an appropriate time to measure the extent of damage to the education system from preschool to Ph D, and strategise ways and means to repair it. Thus far, the Union and state governments have availed the soft option of a comprehensive lockdown of all campuses and classrooms of over 2 million preschools (including 1.6 million government anganwadi centres); 1.5 million primary-secondaries (including 450,000 private schools) with an aggregate enrollment of 260 million children; and 39,931 undergrad colleges and 979 universities with a total enrolment of 39.4 million youth, for over 15 months. The damage suffered by the world’s largest child and youth population by way of loss of learning during the past 56 weeks — the longest shutdown of education institutions worldwide — has not been adequately assessed. According to a detailed Unesco study titled Education from Disruption to Discovery (2021), the prolonged closure of primary-secondary schools in India of 56 weeks and counting, is in sharp contrast to Russia’s 13 weeks, China’s 27, UK 27, France 12, South Africa 37 and Tanzania 15. Only the US (56 weeks) and Brazil (53) have shut their schools for as long. However, it is pertinent to note that the US and European countries are far ahead of India in terms of children’s access to Internet connectivity and digital learning devices. According to a recent study conducted by the India office of Unicef (School Closures in the Context of Covid, 2021), 42 percent children in the 5-13 age group in six states surveyed for the study, haven’t accessed any remote learning content in the year after schools closed in March 2020. Worse, 36 percent of girls and 33 percent boys in the age group 14-18 didn’t access remote learning content either. Indeed, because of continuous under-investment in public education for over six decades after independence, the digital divide between rich and poor, urban and rural is very wide and becoming wider. According to a report in the Economic Times (June 24), official data of the Union education ministry indicates that 70 percent of children in six major states of the Indian Union…
