EMILY SCHMALL & SAMEER YASIR
BLURB: The repercussions can be especially dire in South Asia. Girls are entering into child marriages, and boys have abandoned their education to work
Some children have forgotten the alphabet or what their classrooms look like. Others have dropped out of school entirely, scrounging for work and unlikely to ever resume their studies.
For years, India has been counting on its vast pool of young people as a wellspring of future growth, a “demographic dividend,” as many liked to put it. Now, after two years of the coronavirus pandemic, it is looking more like a lost generation, crushing the middle-class dreams of families looking for better opportunities for their children.
Hundreds of millions of students across India have received little to no in-person instruction with schools intermittently shut down since the start of the pandemic. As pandemic restrictions are lifted, then reimposed, schools are often the first places to close and the last to reopen.
Mahesh Davar, a farmhand in central India, is pained to see his young sons working beside him. He and his wife toiled in the fields to send their boys, now ages 12 and 14, to school, hoping it would secure them better jobs and easier lives.
Their education effectively ended almost two years ago, when schools shifted online; the family lacked the money for internet access. Around the globe, more than 120 million children have faced the same situation, according to the United Nations.
“Poor people like us fight every day to keep the stove burning,” Davar said. “Tell me how and where we will afford the money for mobile phones?”
Until the pandemic, India was pulling millions of people out of poverty, pinning its hopes of greater economic growth on education. That building block for the future is now eroding, threatening to upend India’s hard-fought progress and condemn another generation to manual, off-the-books labor.
“In India, the numbers are mind-numbing,” said Poonam Muttreja, head of Population Foundation of India, an advocacy group in New Delhi. “Gender and other inequalities are widening, and we’ll have much more of a development deficit in the years to come.”
Many countries are weighing the trade-offs between children’s education and public health. As omicron has spread across the United States and Europe, officials have struggled to figure out how and when to keep schools open.
In South Asia, Sri Lanka has decided against closing schools, while in Nepal, they are shut until at least the end of this month, despite the near impossibility of remote instruction in the Himalayan countryside. Swamped with new infections, Bangladesh reversed an earlier decision to allow vaccinated pupils to attend class, closing schools down for all students.
The repercussions can be especially dire in South Asia. Girls are entering into child marriages, and boys have abandoned their education to work.
India’s working-age population is projected to peak at 65 per cent in 2031 before it begins to decline. It’s a potential asset that Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has celebrated, as recently as this month.
“The strength of the youth will take India to greater heights,” he declared at a youth festival.
Typically, a large share of the population entering the workforce would be an economic boon. Now, it could prove a burden, as undereducated and underemployed people in a welfare state such as India end up consuming a larger share of resources, from free medicine to food subsidies.
The ranks of the underemployed are already swelling in India’s capital, New Delhi, which draws young people from villages across the country seeking economic opportunity. Many of them sleep on sidewalks, warm themselves next to big pots of boiling chai and stand every morning at a designated pickup place for daily laborers.
In a gritty corner in the old part of the city littered with clay teacups and spent beedis, Briju Kumar jostled with dozens of others hungry for a day’s work at a construction site. At 14, he abandoned online studies during a partial lockdown last year to contribute to the family’s finances.
“If schools open, I’m not sure I will go back. Only if there is no work,” he said.
His family migrated from Bihar, one of India’s poorest states, when Briju was in the fifth grade so that his father, who never attended school, could earn more money driving an auto rickshaw. Intermittent lockdowns forced the elder Kumar off the roads and his son out of school.
Even before the pandemic, India’s education system was woefully inadequate, with many public schools in rural areas short of teachers and books. Less than half of students possess the reading and math skills to progress to the next grade.
Now, India’s spending on education — already far lower than wealthier countries — has been slashed even more. According to the World Bank, government spending on education fell from 4.4 per cent of gross domestic product in 2019 to 3.4 per cent in 2020.
With schools closed, more children are also going hungry. Many families rely on free school lunches to help meet their children’s nutritional needs.
During India’s first two waves of the pandemic, children were largely forgetting more than they learned, Unicef found. Armed with this data, Unicef has lobbied state governments, which oversee education, not to close schools.
But as Covid-19 infections soared in India, big cities closed schools again last month. Rural India followed suit.
Anuradha Maindola, a lawyer in the north Indian state of Uttarakhand, said her two children, Rudra and Ishita, had only spent about a month in physical classrooms since the Indian government’s first lockdown in March 2020.
She decided to have 8-year-old Ishita, who is struggling to read and write, repeat the first grade. “My children were learning nothing online,” she said. - The New York Times.
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