No school due to Covid-19 pandemic may mean no study for rural students across Maharashtra, warn experts

While Hate has no hopes of returning to the city, her grandsons, Shravan, 6, and Dinesh, 8, have not been able to attend their school over the past several months.

A month after the nationwide lockdown began in March, Radhika Hate, 75, a resident of a slum colony in Borivli, took both her grandsons to their hometown in Mangaon, Konkan. “My daughter, who is the only earning member of the household, lost her job and we could not pay the rent in Mumbai. We moved to our ancestral home and are currently looking for work here,” said Hate.

Representational image. (ILLUSTRATION: Gajanan Nirphale)

While Hate has no hopes of returning to the city, her grandsons, Shravan, 6, and Dinesh, 8, have not been able to attend their school over the past several months. “We have no internet here. The teachers call, but we cannot monitor what the children study. We don’t even have all their books,” said Hate.

Even as demands of ‘no vaccine, no school’ gather steam, for students in rural Maharashtra and those studying in civic schools across the state, the delay in reopening schools can have disastrous consequences, say experts. “Although schools have made the shift from offline to online learning, there are several concerns that need to be addressed while looking at this model in the long term. Children from underprivileged families lack a conducive learning environment at home, as they have small houses, parents struggling to make ends meet, lack of resources like the internet, etc. These challenges are difficult to address for schools, but have far-reaching consequences on students’ learning,” said Ghanashyam Sonar, convener of the All India Right to Education forum.

The principal of a civic school in Mumbai said that even six months after the lockdown, the struggle to get students for online classes and to ensure they learn is still the same. “I remember a case wherein a student was attending an online class and some fight broke out between his parents. The father started beating his mother even as the class was on and the child was so embarrassed that he stopped attending classes for the next few days. We had to counsel him and his parents to finally bring him back. For students like these, the delay in school reopening seems worse than the virus itself,” said the principal.

As per the recently released Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), only 19% students in rural Maharashtra said they were able to attend live online classes. The survey was conducted in 33 districts, with data from 6,800 households from the state, in September 2020.

Madhav Chavan, co-founder of Pratham Education Foundation, said the NGO would conduct another survey to understand the learning levels of students across various grades in the backdrop of closure of schools. “It is significant to understand if there is a change in the basic skills of students during this period, to see whether they can read, write and do maths as per their academic level. After schools reopen, this assessment will be important for schools and students,” he added.

Balu Bhoyar, principal, Karamveer Vidyalaya in Chandrapur, said in rural areas, learning challenges increase for students in the absence of physical schools. “Students are often engaged in household work and agriculture-related work by parents as they misinterpret physical closure of schools as a holiday. This is a big challenge for us and we have been sending teachers into localities to teach students in their homes and to continue their learning. If that does not happen, students will lag behind as there is no internet connectivity and online learning is not feasible,” said Bhoyar.