Digital divide left migrants’ kids out in the cold
NEW DELHI: In May 2020, Sushma, 13, the daughter of migrant labourers, was a Class 8 student in a government school in Narela, Delhi. As India imposed a harsh lockdown in the wake of the first wave of Covid 19, her parents found themselves with no source of income.
The month that followed was hard. For days, Sushma, her parents and two younger siblings lugged around everything they owned, struggling to find a way home to Medinipur in West Bengal, where at the very least, there would the solace of a roof above their heads, and no rent to pay. That wasn’t easy. Then, around the end of April came news of special trains for migrant workers.
For four days, the family of five sat outside registration centres for migrant workers such as them, braving the heat, hunger, thirst and never ending queues. Then finally, on the fifth day, as the pandemic raged, the family was on a packed shramik train heading back to Bengal. It was early May.
The story of Sushma and her family was not uncommon in 2020. For days after India went into complete lockdown, India’s migrants were on the roads, walking, jostling into trucks and buses, struggling to return to their villages with their lives in the big city completely upended. Along with them, went their children, sitting on their parents shoulders, or if they were a little older, carrying luggage disconsolately. It was the beginning of what has been almost two years of a life that has been stop-start — going back to the villages, then returning, and in many cases, after the second wave, going back again.
For children such as Sushma, it has meant one other, very significant thing. For long stretches, they were not in school.
Sushma’s parents lived in a rented one-room house in Narela, and both worked at a shoe factory nearby. They left in May, but were back in Delhi by September, as industries began to restart gingerly. In those four months in Medinipur, the 13-year old had no access to a smartphone. The family didn’t own one. “Someone donated us a phone in November but by then the teachers had completed a large part of the syllabus. It was incredibly difficult to catch up with my peers,” she said.
There was one smartphone between three children; her two younger siblings are in classes 5 and 6. But in the blink of an eye, the family was uprooted again. Their factory shut again in April 2021, as the second wave spread. They left again and only returned in September 2021. But even if Sushma had a phone this time, she still couldn’t study. With no income, paying for a data package was a luxury beyond her parents.
In the fourth part of this series on how the pandemic affected schools and India’s children, HT looks at the effects of the migrant crisis. How on the margins of India’s metropolises, as the medium of education shifted online, the children of the urban poor were left behind.
Displaced and disconnected In its report titled “Impact of Covid 19 on Rising Unemployment and Loss of Jobs/Livelihoods in Organised and Unorganised Sectors”, the parliamentary standing committee on labour said in August 2021 that as many as 1,14,30,968 migrant workers returned to their home states in the first wave of the Covid 19 lockdown between March and May 2020. The states which saw the highest volume of returning migrants were Uttar Pradesh(32,49,638), Bihar (15,00,612) and West Bengal (13,84,693). During the second wave, the report said, enforced between April 2021 and May 2021, 5,15,363 migrant workers returned to their home states.
A 2021 United Nations (UN) report said that migrants and displaced children would be disproportionately affected and suffer long after the public health crisis ended. “For many learners living in displacement, their education will now be more limited or disappear completely,” it predicted. In India, that has not been far from the truth.
Aman Singh, 16, a Class 11 student at the government boys senior secondary school in Dallupura, said he had sleepless nights last year thinking about his Class 10 board exams. “I was promoted to class 10 during the first lockdown. Even before I could start my studies, my family had to return to our village in Almora,” he said.
Singh’s village of Baliya is in the Uttarakhand mountains and even if there was a smartphone, the terrain doesn’t boast good connectivity. “I resumed my studies only after we returned to Delhi in November 2020. I was so happy when Class 10 board exams were cancelled in 2021 because I was not prepared at all. But studies are still a struggle, because my concepts are not clear despite now, in Class 11,” Singh said.
According to the data collected by the Union education ministry from 24 states and Union Territories (UTs) until June, 29 million school students did not have access to digital devices. In cities such as Delhi, the urban poor are particularly affected.
The family of Ehtasham Alam, a Class 7 student at the Sarvodaya Bal Vidyalaya in Burari for instance has never owned a smartphone. His father, a daily wage labourer earned just enough to feed his family of five. In May 2020, the family returned to their village in Bihar’s Siwan. “It was impossible for us to buy a phone for our children at a time when we were even struggling to arrange food and water. We returned to our village in May and it was difficult to convince our children that things would go back to normal. I cannot forget the days when my children slept on an empty stomach. Who will think about studies in a situation like that?” asked Afsana Khatoon, Alam’s mother.
The family returned to Delhi after over a year in June 2021. “But the children have lost interest in studies after spending more than a year being completely out of contact with their teachers. It will take a lot of time to bring them back on track,” she added.
Sonal Kapoor, founder of Protsahan India Foundation, a Delhibased Child Rights NGO, said that
Covid-19 has uprooted children from spaces where they generally used to find their sense of belonging, joy and sense of safety. “Thousands of children faced severe deprivation of core basic rights, due to severe income losses in their families. They witnessed circumstances where survival became the priority and everything else, including education, took a backseat.”
Over the past 20 months, states and UTs have reopened schools and then shut them down again, with waves of the pandemic rising and ebbing. For instance, in Delhi, schools were reopened partially in January and February 2021 after almost 10 months of being closed. However, as the second wave of pandemic shook the country in April, the Delhi government again shut schools that month. In September, the state government again reopened schools for classes 9 to 12 and in November for all other classes. Within weeks, the schools again shut down due to the rising pollution levels and now due to the increasing cases of the Omicron variant of covid-19.
Teachers said that this discontinuity has affected marginalised children the most, exacerbated by migration. “A majority of these students were completely out of contact with their teachers due to the lack of smartphones. Those, who were living in Delhi amid the lockdown, were at least getting hardcopies of worksheets and notes from their schools. But for those who had returned to their villages in the hinterland, this option didn’t exist. This made the situation more difficult specifically for children who were already deprived,” said Arvind Kumar Jha, a mathematics teacher at a government school in Jhilmil Colony.
According to a survey report released by the UN Children’s Fund (Unicef) in September, 15% more migrant parents and 9% more ST (Scheduled Tribe) parents reported that their children were learning less.
Way ahead
Addressing the educational issues of children such as the ones Jha is talking about will take some doing. Gargi Kapoor, national manager (mission education) Smile Foundation, said all stakeholders including the government, civil society organisations and communities will have to come together to discuss and bridge the gap.
In January 2021, the Union ministry of education issued guidelines for “identification, admission and continued education” of migrant children in India, to minimise the impact of pandemic on school education in the country. The ministry asked all states and Union Territories to identify such kids and ensure they attend schools. Officials at the Delhi government’s education department said that several steps have been taken to ensure that every child returns to school including door-to–door campaigns, and mailing letters and learning material to the students who left Delhi during successive lockdowns. “The government will also come up with a 100-day plan to bridge the learning gap among students. It will be implemented once schools reopen again and special attention will be given to each and every student,” said a senior official at the department who asked not to be named.
Educationist Meeta Sengupta said that such “bridge courses” must be designed to mitigate learning loss among marginalised children. “Migrant children live in a state of constant learning loss and catch-up programs being designed for pandemic learning loss should be made a regular part of the academic year to ensure support. The double whammy of the pandemic and migrant movement hurt these children the most and makes them vulnerable to exploitation if we do not do more. This means community learning mechanisms, creating multiple support hubs with para teachers mentored by seniors, teaching vans and similar schemes that take learning to the children wherever they are.”
As Omicron looms over the national capital, physical classes in schools were shut again in late December . In her one room home in Narela, for Sushma that means a return to online study, the battle over the family’s one smartphone with her two siblings, “I was heartbroken when schools were closed again. It has become a never ending cycle. All day, the three of us stay home and fight over the use of the phone. But I don’t want to go back to the village. That I am clear about,” the 13 year old said.