D K Pandita
‘All schools in the national capital will remain closed till further orders.’ “No student of any classes should be called physically in the school, Class 10 Exams cancelled and 12 deffered?.”
Since independence India has taken numerous steps to strengthen and expand its educational system, India’s first Education Minister, Maulana Azad, founded a system for free and compulsory education at the primary level for children from 6-14. Most IITs were established in early 1950’s and 1960’s, to further strengthen it in 2009, the Right to Education clause was inserted in the constitution for this purpose. The development of education in India and its contemporary neighbor China used entirely different paths and the results are visible. To make education more attractive and centered around the disadvantaged, incentives such as mid-day meals were introduced, for liberalization, educational cess was added to income tax but all these measures shall go in vain if the concrete measures are not initiated at the earliest in these trying times particularly after the Pandemic of 2019.
The present scenario of Indian education is at crossroads. Its liberal-secular character and content, carefully nourished during the last seventy years, despite several vicissitudes, is now undergoing fundamental transformation. Education is the best instrument for moderating behavior but its real impact is the rewards it brings for the country. Lack of education, is as much of a handicap for an individual as it is an obstacle for country’s operations. Education is one of the four major issues that hinder the prosperity of a nation, the other three being population, poverty and corruption. Since independence Indians worked hard to built their educational system but the scenario has been totally put into a challenge after the outbreak of Covid-19.
Covid-19 has affected over 1.54 billion students globally. It disrupted the established system of education even in developed countries, which led to abrupt shut down of schools and other educational institutions. Now there are concerns that not all may return to classrooms when schools resume as were during the pre Covid19. Several experts have voiced concerns over rise in dropout rates in schools as new socio-economic dynamic form in a post Covid-19 world. In India all educational institutions whether under-graduate or post-graduate are either shut or the classes are going online due to the fear and surging graph of Covid-19 since 2020. But a lot of developing countries of the world are at the threshold of losing their pupils due to the social and economic factors. India being a country having the maximum numbers of people living below poverty line may be affected to an extent that its revival will cost not years but decades.
In India nearly 57 million people had joined the middle-class income group between 2011 and 2019, and their socio-economic aspects had also changed but these changes have been reversed very quickly due to loss of jobs and hard earning savings during the lockdowns and medical emergencies. The hard hitting economic aspects of Covid-19 can be easily estimated when we count the descending numbers of people in the middle class from 99 million to 66 million within a year, the second wave of 2021 will definitely shrunk it further, to what extent the prediction will be is unimaginable and even scary.
Experts are of the opinion that, when students miss school, they not only stop learning new things, but also forget what they had already learnt. So, when school resumes, they will have very little time to catch up. Even before the pandemic, the quality of education in rural India was so poor that 12 years of school meant effective learning of just 6.2 years, this will further drop to 5.5 years. According to the World Bank Community volunteers who reached out to 300 habitants in 12 districts across seven states in August-September 2020, found children engaged as paid worker are pushed into child labor, the situation being similar in both rural and urban areas of Indian.
On one side the Government aims to achieve ‘universal foundational literacy and numeracy’ in primary schools by 2025, but contrary to this the pandemic has closed most Government and private educational institutions where the dropout rate has reached 20 to 30 percent. The Gross Enrollment Ratio from preschool to secondary education should be 100 per cent by 2030. But figures show that the new admission to pre primary and primary schools has drastically declined both in rural and urban private cum government run schools. So, under these conditions the policy suggests establishing ‘school complexes’ consisting of a secondary school and other schools offering lower grades of education including Anganwadi centers in a radius of 5 to 10 kilometers, which is a dream which may take some decades to fulfill.
The next most challenge is to coordinate among the states to implement the policy in which the centre and states shall work together to increase public investment in education to 6 per cent of the gross domestic product (GDP), from the current 4.43 per cent. It is pretend to mention that some states have already showed their unwillingness to allow and follow the New Education Policy due to their political and other reservations. In the present circumstances, in our country since 1947 the students face a lot of education, exam-related and post education career related stress and anxiety which affects them at a tender age, earlier the result of it was higher dropout ratio, now in present context its result is that they spend more time on easily available and affordable social media sites rather than indulging in sports or adventure activities. The national and regional stakeholders should keep these aspects under consideration while implementing the new policies at macro and micro levels with regard to of ‘New Education Policy 2020’.
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