The toll Covid has taken on our children

As the world unites in a furious effort to predict the contours of the next Covid wave, riding on the Delta variant, we may be inadvertently neglecting something equally grave—the long-term fallout of the first two waves. The massive death toll aside, the past almost-two years have had a devastating effect on quality of life, particularly so for the more vulnerable humans, like our children. Every aspect of a child’s life, from school to play, has been deeply impacted.

The effect of such extreme social-physical deprivation is bound to be severe on a developing mind. Worse, there really is no end in sight: No one knows when exactly schools will reopen, or in what form, or whether and when the children will be vaccinated. And that’s just the disarray on the surface. Go deeper, and imagine the devastating effect this disruption has had in a country like India, where midday schemes at school conjoin fundamental policy goals like nutrition and primary education. 

On the socio-economic landscape, the pandemic has set us back by a few decades. Poor parents in rural and urban India losing their livelihoods (if not lives) to the virus has pushed kids into the unorganised labour market. Child labour, child marriage, child crime, child adoption racket, you name it, all are on the rise. What’s dropping? The number of kids in school, the quantum of food they get.

The digital divide in education is widening alarmingly; school dropouts are expected to double, so is malnutrition. That’s not even mentioning mental health. With all the uncertainty surrounding them, and being virtually locked in their homes, our children are taking on an asocial aspect. Karnataka is still tinkering with its plans on reopening schools, and on child vaccination. When firefighting is the mode of governance, you can expect the government to be perpetually locked into near-sightedness. But not having a clear roadmap to navigate India out of this morass will mean we are cheating our future itself.