In addition to the economic fallout and numerous systemic failures that were experienced during the entire episode of the COVID pandemic, India has witnessed innovative disruptions, especially in the designing of public policies. Among other things, India’s education system has been a great casualty. 

It was at the peak of the pandemic period that the government rolled out the National Educational Policy (NEP) 2020 without placing the draft for parliamentary debates. The unprecedented modalities adopted for the lockdown led to the imposition of new rules to continue education under the online mode. 

The compounding effect of it, as the latest reports and studies show, has reinforced unequal educational opportunities and unintended consequences. The imposition of online teaching as an alternative strategy aiming to provide unhindered teaching during the lockdown has worsened living and learning conditions. 

The concerned authorities were seen to have paid scant attention to the critical issues of accessibility, affordability and the feasibility of providing the required pedagogical infrastructure, especially to the most marginalised sections and regions of India. 

The new facts and figures not only expose such claims to the contrary but also provide a critical lesson in re-envisioning education for a participatory approach in order to design comprehensive policies and programmes with adequate public funding. 

The right to education for all is fundamentally our democratic commitment that should also be from the point of view of young learners from the most unfavourable conditions of our society. With the pandemic-induced lockdown and its catastrophe, one of the promising institutions that were at the centre of the crisis and struggled to overcome it has been the schools across the world. 

The unprecedented educational disruption affected millions of students across the planet because of the closure of educational institutions. The effectiveness of remote learning, equal opportunities for online classes, the strategies to mitigate the loss of learning and the re-opening of schools have invited wider public attention. 

In order to contain the spread of the pandemic, most nations closed educational institutions at different stages and teaching and learning have affected 60 per cent of the student population on a different scale since the mid of February 2020. This uniform action further exacerbated the existing disparities within the education system and other aspects of human life. It also widened learning inequality among students of vulnerable sections of society disproportionately. 

The transition from the modes of school learning to distance learning through online platforms frustrated intimate human relations and equally hassled all the affected sections, including the teachers, students and parents even if and when the best technical support was provided. 

Lack of social interaction with the peer groups left many students in isolation and their social lives being insulated by home conditions. On the other hand, the administrative pressure to finish online classes and examinations to scale up the quality of education and advancements in new admissions caused or experienced widespread disarray as educational institutions continued to remain closed for months together. 

What the Annual School Education Report points to?

India was among the nations that held the longest period of school closures due to the pandemic. Acknowledging this fact, the Annual School Education Report (ASER) records the growing concerns over learning caused by the disruption of face-to-face or physical teaching and learning. 

A large section of school teachers (70 per cent) pursued teaching in online mode. Among the core challenges they faced include: teaching the same content multiple times (46 per cent), low attendance (30 per cent), inability to catch up with the curriculum, technical glitches (22 per cent), mismanagement of covid guidelines (22 per cent) and lack of parental support (24 per cent). 

Accordingly, the pertinent questions regarding access to education, alarming rates of dropout, growing trend of loss of learning and widening of the learning gap among the marginalised groups emerged as a contrast against the overall progress claimed in the realms of education and social development. 

Without giving adequate attention to the structural inequalities and the persistence of educational inequality, the imposition of rules from above and forcible shifting of the conventional modes of teaching has invited more troubles to the teaching and learning processes. The consequences of the sudden shifts in the learning environment from the physical site of the school to the households with a new mode of learning aid have produced disastrous outcomes. 

Prudence dictates that for the convenience of governance, one cannot overlook the existing structural problems embedded in the system. Furthermore, crises should not be used as an opportunity to find alternative ways to elicit critical responses or feedback from the existing structural constraints. 

The pattern of educational inequality and its persistence is vital for contextualising the problems in education, especially the social context of learning and learning processes. Any new adaptation in the educational system should fundamentally depend on the preamble of social conditions in which the system rests. 

Troubling statistics

There are more than 15 lakh schools in India and the educational statistics of 2018 reported that the Growth Enrolment Rate (GRE) has been obtained reasonably well with 25 crores of students. Though the general dropout rate was at the lowest rate (4%) at the primary level, it shot up (17%) in the upper primary. 

More expansion of educational institutions was reported in the private sector. On the contrary, in the public-funded schools, the enrolment began to decline drastically with the absence of teachers and the quality of the teaching. Elementary schools alone reported a shortfall of 9.80 lakh teachers against the vacancies of 51.8 lakh posts in 2016. Meanwhile, the government closed down 94407 schools between 2012 and 2015 as part of the school merger policy. 

However, in different stages of the post-pandemic reopening of schools, there has been a noticeable change in the student enrolment rate. In rural areas, students have moved out of private to government schools. The percentage of students in government schools increased from 64.3 in 2018 to 70.3 in 2021 and reduced in private schools from 33.5 to 24.4 in the same period. Though the rate of unenrolled children increased from 2.5 to 4.6 per cent in primary schools, improvement was seen in high schools from 7 to 12 per cent. 

Regretfully, the per cent of total expenditure on education in the year 2021 was the lowest in the last six years. In addition to the economic slowdown, the increasing rate of unemployment led by the lockdown has also adversely affected the spending in the education system. 

The data on the uneven distribution of basic infrastructure would expose various claims as also the detrimental effects of online learning during the pandemic. Electricity supply was unevenly distributed across the states and acute situations were prevalent in the North-Eastern and Himalayan states. 

Without an adequate and frequent supply of electricity across the schools in the remotest and rural areas of India, one may wonder how the entire education system ran into the online mode of learning with modest internet access (33.9 per cent) and fewer computer gadgets (10 per cent). Schools in Uttar Pradesh, for example, were reported with the lowest rate of computer facilities (2.9 per cent) and yet secured the highest number of enrolments during the pandemic (13.2). 

Technology has its limits

Needless to emphasise, the pandemic deeply hit the educational system already affected by the embedded structural problems and the colossal approach of the governance system. At the same time, the core effort throughout has been to connect the educational system to the world of ICT and integrate new skills and competencies related to electronic and advanced digital media technologies as part of reform strategies. 

However, such far-reaching changes are not necessarily meant for an online pedagogical system amid the crisis we have already witnessed in the existing systems like open schooling. The current facts indicate a cluelessness about the feasibility and viability of ICT architecture in education, skilled and technical manpower and their availability and distribution across the length and breadth of the nation. Only a realistic assessment could provide awareness about the means to address the challenges of teaching programmes through the digital mode. 

The glaring eye-opener from the pandemic was that access to technology for all young learners, particularly from marginalised communities in remote areas, remained the key hindrance to the online learning mode. Although television remains the most penetrated medium in India, it covers 100 million households (51 per cent) against a total of 193 million in 2018. 

Similarly, 31 per cent of 480 million people are internet users and the number of smartphone users will be less than reported facts. About 80 per cent of students in rural areas were adversely affected in their learning practices as schools were turned into online mode. 

It is reported that only 15 per cent of the rural household had access to the internet as compared to 42 per cent in the urban household. The digital divide in India was obvious and the rhetoric of online classes as an alternative to the conventional mode of learning caused highly differentiated learning outcomes among the poor sections.

Adaptive strategies need to be inclusive

Unless adaptive strategies are well-informed and integrated into the entire spectrum of the population, the mode of online learning, as the ground realities suggest, will adversely affect students who come from poor sections of our society. Though such adaptations are necessary, they are feasible only when minimum conditions in educational institutions with adequate infrastructure are created. 

Such integration also demands a participatory approach by involving the teachers in the school, community members and local governing institutions. Many of the current approaches and practices seem to lack a comprehensive view of ICT in the educational system in order to create a new ecosystem for inclusive learning. 

The need for a clear, comprehensive and inclusive road map to ensure uniform access to digital infrastructure, especially in the remotest area of India, cannot be emphasized enough. The truism that only a privileged minority in the urban spaces are the beneficiaries of these new social arrangements, unlike those in the rural regions with poor infrastructure and access to technology, should continue to manifest as a stark reality for planners. 

A new beginning can be made only with the acknowledgement of the impediments of structural factors by the policymakers and technocrats failing which the fundamental idea of equal access to education as a right enshrined in our constitution will remain undermined.

(Views expressed are of the author)