Page 36 - EducationWorld March 2022

Cover Story

10

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

Dilip Thakore & Summiya Yasmeen

W ITH THE WORST OF THE alarm, about the disruption in the country’s education sys-

Covid-19 pandemic and its
tem. From pre-primary schools to universities, it has been
Delta and Omicron vari-
under strict lockdown for 82 weeks barring a few brief in-
ants which disrupted in-
significant re-opening of campuses in some states.
Although your editors have been stridently advocating
dustry, business and com-
merce to the extent that the
Indian economy contract-
year and had published a detailed cover story last July titled
‘Why Schools Should Open Right Now!’ (educationworld.
ed by an unprecedented reopening schools and all education institutions for over a
7.6 percent in fiscal 2020-21 over, the economy is limping in/why-india’s-schools-should-open-right-now/), neither
back to normal with GDP forecast to grow by 8.2 percent the government nor the influential urban middle class, paid
in the year ending March 31, 2023. The damage in terms of any heed. Our main arguments were that several authori-
5.12 lakh lives lost hasn’t been catastrophic, although that tative research studies indicated that children are rarely
number is widely believed to be an under-estimate. More- at risk of contracting severe illness from the Covid-19 vi-
over, even if the number of lives lost is ten multiples of the rus, and that schools operating at 50 percent capacity with
official figure, it is still well short of the 18 million lives lost students attending on alternative days while maintaining
during the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-20. strict Covid protocols would mitigate learning loss, espe-
Yet even though the damage inflicted by Covid-19 in cially among youngest children.
terms of economic output and lives and livelihoods lost has Evidently these and other arguments failed to resonate
been well managed by the Central and state governments — with the political class countrywide which preferred to err
90 percent of the adult population has been double-jabbed on the side of caution in the matter of child safety. The po-
by anti-Covid vaccines — there’s little awareness, let alone litical fallout of children contracting the dread virus in un-

36 EDUCATIONWORLD MARCH 2022