Over 250 million children enrolled in primary and secondary schools in India have not stepped into their classrooms since March 2020 when t...
Over 250 million children enrolled in primary and secondary schools in India have not stepped into their classrooms since March 2020 when the coronavirus pandemic triggered an abrupt nationwide lockdown. Today marks 500 days of school closure.
While a few states have recently announced plans to reopen schools for Classes 9-12, there is no word on when younger children will be able to return to their classrooms.
“Malls, cinema halls and marriage halls have been allowed to open,” said Niranjanaradhya VP, a development educationist who guides school development and monitoring committees in Karnataka. “But there has been no talk of schools reopening.”
The delay is having catastrophic consequences for India’s children, say educators and child rights activists.
For one, most children haven’t had any exposure to formal learning for more than a year. Only one in four children in India have access to the digital devices and internet connectivity required to transition to online education, according to a Unicef report released in March 2021.
Even schools lack infrastructure to relay lessons digitally. In the run-up to the pandemic, less than 12% of government schools had internet facilities and less than 30% had functional computers, according to 2019-’20 data released by the education ministry.
Some states have been broadcasting classes on television. But...
