Pandemic further deepens the gap in education sector
India’s weak digital tech leaves poor kids out of e-learning
With the pandemic forcing hundreds of thousands of educational institutions in India into “temporary closures” since March last year, millions of children in the country are having a hard time as they grapple with makeshift learning arrangements.
Amid the ongoing COVID-19 threat, young pupils in India, which is home to the world’s second-largest school system after China, have switched to e-learning.
But for many poor millions, internet connectivity — or even a mobile phone — is a luxury they cannot afford, and as a result, a large majority find themselves virtually shut out from the mainstream.
By a rough estimate, only a third of 320 million schoolchildren are pursuing education online in the South Asian nation, which has some of the world’s worst income-disparity levels.
According to a report released last year by the National Sample Survey Office, an entity under India’s statistics ministry, 32 million children had been out of school before the pandemic broke out. The number “will double in a year’s time”, the report warned.
With the second wave of COVID now wreaking havoc across the nation, India is fighting a grim battle to contain the spread of infections.
On April 29, the country reported 379,257 new cases, marking a fresh world record in terms of daily coronavirus infections. The total case count stands at more than 18.3 million.
Meanwhile, the death toll from the pandemic reached more than 204,800, with 3,645 deaths recorded over a 24-hour period.
Amid the worsening pandemic, there has been a fresh wave of closures of educational institutions, adding to the already grim situation for millions of poor school children.
“Yes, there is a vast unconnected and underserved community that is losing out on education because they do not have access to devices and infrastructure to carry on with e-learning,” said Osama Manzar, founder and director of Digital Empowerment Foundation, or DEF, a New Delhi-based organization that focuses on solutions to bridge the digital divide.
Never before have inequalities and disparities been so starkly in evidence, Manzar said.
“Close to 70 percent of these schools are located in rural or semi-urban areas where a majority of these learners do not have the access to the necessary tools and infrastructure such as internet connectivity, a smartphone or a laptop,” Manzar said.
Moreover, whatever space the kids have at home is not conducive to learning, Manzar said.
Not only are they digitally disconnected, they are also mentally and psychologically disconnected, he said.
“Numerous poor students will never come back to school. There is going to be apathy toward school-going on a massive scale. It’s already happening in various parts of India. It’s going to be a permanent damage,” said Partha Banerjee, a New York-based educator and human rights activist.
“Society will become even more educationally and … economically divided,” Banerjee said, adding that this would be “a serious problem” for India going forward.
A recent study from Azim Premji University, which is based in Bangalore, has said the school closures have already had implications.
The closures “resulted in complete disconnect from education for the vast majority of children or inadequate alternatives like communitybased classes or poor alternatives in the form of online education, including mobile phone-based learning,” the study said.
“One full academic year is gone, but what is alarming is the widespread phenomenon of ‘forgetting’ by students of learning from the previous class. Being out of school for long means that children not only stop learning new things, they also forget some of what they have learned,” it pointed out.
Manzar from DEF also pointed to “serious discrimination against girls in particular, in terms of access to education. “COVID-19 has highlighted the deep cesspool of the digital exclusion of girls,” he said.
Sudakshina Basu, who teaches at a girls’ high school in suburban Kolkata in India’s eastern West Bengal state, corroborated.
“Given the socioeconomic background of the children, not everyone will have access to mobile phones at a given class time. It would either be used by their parents or someone elder at home,” added Basu.
“It must be even more challenging in villages because of poor mobile network connectivity and availability of mobile phones. I only wish the government distributed cheap mobiles to kids …,” she said.
In short, the story is all about disconnect and lack of access, and the looming risk of millions of students disappearing from the mainstream of education.
Banerjee said it is high time civil society created its own educational platforms, and took advantage of technology to fill in the educational gaps.
“In India or Bangladesh, many people and organizations are trying to do it. But their challenges are enormous, especially because powerful political parties and their media do not want civil society to empower themselves,” Banerjee said.
Manzar of DEF spoke about a “Digital Daan” initiative that his organization has launched.
Through Digital Daan — the word ‘daan’ means donation in Hindi — the non-profit group has collected more than 5,000 used electronic devices.
“We will set up 500 community digital access points to provide connectivity-based infrastructure to access digital content and conduct classes online … We hope to benefit more than half a million children and youth through this initiative,” Manzar said.
“The aim is to find a digital solution for the children who haven’t visited their schools for months, and also for those out of school.”