[Experts say the consequences of school closures on the country’s most vulnerable students — especially girls — could be serious. Students from poor and marginalized communities face enormous hurdles to continuing their education even in normal times. Now many of their families are under severe financial stress as India’s economy contracts. The absence of schooling combined with falling incomes is likely to lead to higher rates of child labor and child marriages.]
Any other year, Jaysinge would be
studying in the modest school near her village in western India. It closed in
March. Now she spends her days fetching water, cooking meals and hauling cane.
Online learning is out of the
question. “We were struggling to eat,” Jaysinge said, “so how would we manage
to get a smartphone?” She misses school and hopes to return as soon as it
reopens. Until then, she said, “I'm trying to help my parents in whatever way I
can.”
Jaysinge is one of tens of millions
of Indian children who have not seen the inside of a classroom since March, a
hiatus that educators say is without precedent in the country’s history. In
major metropolises such as Mumbai and Delhi, schools remain shut for a ninth
month. While some states have reopened high schools, the majority of India’s 320 million students remain
at home as part of the effort to fight the coronavirus pandemic.
Experts say the consequences of
school closures on the country’s most vulnerable students — especially girls —
could be serious. Students from poor and marginalized communities face enormous
hurdles to continuing their education even in normal times. Now many of their
families are under severe financial stress as India’s economy contracts. The absence of schooling
combined with falling incomes is likely to lead to higher rates of child labor
and child marriages.
“Even a year of lost education has
been recognized as having significant economic, health and employment effects,”
said Vikram Patel, a professor of global health at Harvard Medical School who
divides his time between India and the United States. “Imagine when you
translate that into tens of millions of children.”
School provided a critical anchor
for children like Jaysinge. Every winter, her parents travel hundreds of miles
for six months of backbreaking labor in the cane fields. Normally, they leave
her with relatives so she can study. This year, for the first time, they
brought her with them.
Not far from Jaysinge, 14-year-old
Manohar Padwi was loading chopped sugar cane into the same truck. His
education, too, hangs by a thread. If schools were open, his mother said, Padwi
would have somewhere to go each day and would at least receive one cooked meal.
Instead, his parents decided to take him with them for the harvest to share the
workload. They don’t have the money to buy a ticket to send him home even if
schools do restart.
Students like Padwi have already
fallen behind in their studies. A nationwide survey by the nonprofit Pratham
Education Foundation found that only about
a third of the students in rural areas had received any learning
material in the previous week. Although smartphone use is increasing, less
than half of Indians are Internet users.
The shift to remote learning is
resulting in “enormous dropouts and substantial learning losses” that will
reduce the earning potential of a generation of students, the World Bank
said in
a recent report on South Asia.
Other impacts may take time to
emerge. In India, schools also act as a linchpin of efforts to improve
nutrition by providing students cooked meals, often with proteins such as eggs.
Those endeavors, too, are on hold. States have made attempts to replace those
meals by sending rations or cash to families, albeit with varying degrees of
success.
India has the second-largest number
of coronavirus cases in the world, but daily infections have fallen sharply in
recent months. “We must prioritize the reopening of schools,” said Patel, who
notes that India’s climate would allow for outdoor classes in much of the
country. But children appear “expendable when it comes to the health of
grown-ups.”
For girls, the situation could be
especially precarious. The Indian government, multinational organizations and
nonprofit groups have spent years trying to reduce the gap in school enrollment
between boys and girls, with some notable progress. Now such gains are
“definitely at risk,” said Yasmin Ali Haque, UNICEF’S representative in India.
Schools provide a way for girls in
a conservative society to leave home, meet friends, spend time away from
household chores and perhaps chart their own futures. In a country where
about one-fourth
of young women marry before the age of 18, attending school “is a core
solution for keeping girls out of marriage,” Haque said. When schools reopen,
she added, special efforts will be required to make sure that girls return.
Girls and boys already have very
different experiences of the extended school closure. A survey of more
than 3,000 households across India focusing on low-income families
found that 71 percent of girls were engaged in chores at home, compared
with 38 percent of boys. Higher percentages of boys than girls were able
to spend time on their studies and access phones, often the only way to connect
to the Internet.
With schools closed for months,
some girls are facing increasing pressure from their families to marry. Sudha
Varghese is an activist and nun who has worked for decades to educate girls
from the Dalit community — formerly known as “untouchables” — in the northern
state of Bihar. She estimates that she has prevented about a dozen child
marriages in the last two months alone.
Some parents are telling their
daughters, “You don’t have anything to do, you don’t have your studies, you’re
just staying here, so let’s go, let’s get [your marriage] settled,” Varghese
said.
Laxmi Kumari, an 18-year-old in
grade 12 in the state of Uttar Pradesh, managed to avoid getting married once
before, thanks to the intervention of a local nongovernmental organization. Now
fresh exams loom in the spring, and she feels hopelessly behind after the long
months without school. She tried her best to keep up: Her family doesn’t own a
smartphone, so she cycled to a friend’s house twice a week to see what her
teachers were sending. Still, she found it difficult to follow.
If she passes her exams, Kumari
will try to convince her parents to postpone her marriage so she can pursue her
dream of becoming a teacher. “But right now, I don’t know if I can pass given
how much time has been lost,” she said.
Across India, educators have
attempted to reach out to students in all kinds of unusual and creative ways,
including using radio
programs and loudspeaker
tutorials to teach children without Internet access. One teacher even
built a platform
in a tree to get better cellular signal to transmit lessons. Despite
such efforts, some children — particularly in rural areas of poorer states —
have received little to no learning material.
Sonu Kumar Singh, a 12-year-old
from an indigenous community, lives in a village called Jagtu in a rural
district of the state of Jharkhand. He used to love putting on his school
uniform — white shirt, maroon pants — and studying English. His government-run
school has not provided any kind of distance learning since it shut in March,
and even if it did, his family doesn’t own a smartphone.
“The year has gone by. I have
forgotten all that I had learned at school,” Singh said. “Sometimes I open my
books, but I don’t understand much.”
Rukmini Banerji, chief executive of
the Pratham Education Foundation, said she is especially worried about what
will happen to kids in early adolescence who have fallen behind their grade
level in math and reading skills. Such children and their families might decide
further education is futile.
“It’s obvious to everyone,
including themselves, that they’re not at a 14-year-old learning level,”
Banerji said. “You could start to feel, ‘What’s the point?’ ”
Deepak Nagargoje, an activist who
works with the children of migrant workers, said India’s emphasis on online
learning is further widening the gap between privileged and underprivileged
children. Some of the children currently working in the sugar cane fields in western
Maharashtra will return to their villages once schools reopen, he said, but
catching up will be difficult. “We run the risk of dealing with a rise in child
labor and dropout rates,” Nagargoje said.
On a recent morning, 14-year-old
Mauli Jadhav had just returned to his family’s makeshift hut on the edge of the
sugar cane fields after filling up the day’s jugs of water. His education has
been frozen since March.
He spends his day doing chores and
in the evening sometimes plays cricket. “There are a lot of kids like me here,”
he said. Someday, he added with excitement, the schools will restart and they
will all go back home.
Slater and Masih reported from New
Delhi.
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