School void could undo progress report of decades
Activists warn rising economic distress may translate into surge in child labour
Malls are open. Restaurants are packed. Markets are buzzing. As coronavirus cases plummet to their lowest levels in months, India’s lockdown feels increasingly like a thing of the past.
But 18 months after primary school students were sent home in March 2020, tens of millions remain out of school. Schools for older children have gradually reopened, but primary schools in more than half a dozen states have not.
Education professionals warn that the break in education threatens decades of progress in raising literacy rates.
The 2011 census, India’s most recent, recorded the national literacy rate at more than 73 per cent, a jump of more than 20 percentage points from two decades before. This signalled the success of government efforts to provide universal free education. A yawning gap between male and female literacy, too, had narrowed.
But recent studies paint a grim picture of the impact of the extended school closures.
A survey in August spanning 15 states found that 37 per cent of children in grades one through eight in rural areas were not studying at all, and nearly 50 per cent could not read more than a few words. Results in urban areas were only marginally better.
Reetika Khera, a professor of economics at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi who helped oversee the survey, worries that the scale of the problem isn’t widely understood. “These numbers suggest that an entire generation faces the real risk of remaining illiterate,” she said.
Jean Drze, a development economist who helped conduct the survey, said a comparison of the last census and the survey reveals an alarming trend. The average literacy rate in India for rural children aged 8 to 12 in 2011 was 88 per cent. In the survey, it was 53 per cent.
“Millions of children in India are in danger of being effectively left out of elementary education from now on,” he said. “This would condemn most of them to a life of hard labour.”
Activists warn of a rise in child labour as families in continued economic distress reach a breaking point. In some parts of the country, school girls are being married off.