Post-pandemic recovery solutions

Following the most prolonged education lockdown of any major country worldwide, the world’s largest cohort of children and youth estimated at 500 million has suffered huge learning loss and has a steep mountain to climb to make good the lost lessons of the pandemic era, writes Dilip Thakore & Summiya Yasmeen 

With the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic and its Delta and Omicron variants which disrupted industry, business and commerce to the extent that the Indian economy contracted by an unprecedented 7.6 percent in fiscal 2020-21 over, the economy is limping back to normal with GDP forecast to grow by 8.2 percent in the year ending March 31, 2023. The damage in terms of 5.12 lakh lives lost hasn’t been catastrophic, although that number is widely believed to be an under-estimate. Moreover, even if the number of lives lost is ten multiples of the official figure, it is still well short of the 18 million lives lost during the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-20.

Yet even though the damage inflicted by Covid-19 in terms of economic output and lives and livelihoods lost has been well managed by the Central and state governments — 90 percent of the adult population has been double-jabbed by anti-Covid vaccines — there’s little awareness, let alone alarm, about the disruption in the country’s education system. From pre-primary schools to universities, it has been under strict lockdown for 82 weeks barring a few brief insignificant re-opening of campuses in some states.

Although your editors have been stridently advocating reopening schools and all education institutions for over a year and had published a detailed cover story last July titled ‘Why Schools Should Open Right Now!’ (educationworld.in/why-india’s-schools-should-open-right-now/), neither the government nor the influential urban middle class, paid any heed. Our main arguments were that several authoritative research studies indicated that children are rarely at risk of contracting severe illness from the Covid-19 virus, and that schools operating at 50 percent capacity with students attending on alternative days while maintaining strict Covid protocols would mitigate learning loss, especially among youngest children.