Delhi itself has shuttled between opening and closing multiple times. (File) On January 10, a headline flashed across news portals around the globe: “Uganda reopens schools after world’s longest Covid-19 shutdown.” In India’s capital, however, repeated and extended closures have meant primary and middle school children have barely attended physical school since the beginning of the pandemic.
According to UNESCO’s ‘global date sheet on the duration of school closures’, which has data on the number of weeks of full and partial closure in every country between March 2020 and October 21, 2021, schools were closed in Uganda for 83 weeks till then — 60 weeks of full closure and 23 weeks of partial closure.
India follows with 82 weeks of closure, along with Nepal and Bolivia, with 25 weeks of full closure and 57 weeks of partial closure.
However, these country-wide figures do not reflect regional variations in an opening and closing process that has to some extent been carried out in a decentralised way in India. From March 1, 2020, to October 31, 2021, Delhi schools were shut for 85 weeks or approximately 19 months — fully closed for 65 weeks, partially for 20 weeks.
Other major metropolitan cities in India, with varying Covid circumstances, have had different reopening timelines:
– In Kolkata for instance, schools have not opened for primary and middle school children for even a single day since they first closed on March 14, 2020.
– In Mumbai, schools reopened after the first extended closure on October 4, 2021, for classes VIII to XII. They had reopened for classes I to VII as well on December 15 before closing completely on January 3 with the onset of the current wave. The local government has now decided that schools will reopen for all grades, including pre-primary, on Monday.
– Ahmedabad tried opening for classes VI to VIII earlier in February 2021 before closing on March 18 due to the second wave. These grades opened again on September 2, followed by classes I to V on November 22. Schools closed for classes I-IX on January 8 because of the current wave.
– Delhi itself has shuttled between opening and closing multiple times. Schools first opened for classes IX to XII in January 2021 before they closed on April 9 with the onset of the second wave. Schools then opened for these grades from September.
The capital had also ventured into reopening for pre-primary, primary and middle school students from November 1. But within two weeks, physical classes for all grades were suspended from November 15 over rising air pollution levels. Schools reopened for all grades on November 29 and were ordered to shut yet again within days, citing pollution, on December 2. The year 2021 saw Delhi’s longest ‘air pollution closure’.
While schools briefly opened for classes VI to XII for 10 days, they closed completely on December 29. The net result is that schools have been permitted to open for primary classes for 18 days since the start of the pandemic.
Amid the third wave, discussions around reopening centre around speeding up vaccination for 15-17- year-olds. Immunisa-tion against Covid-19 opened up for this age group on January 3 and the government is aiming to vaccinate 100% eligible teenagers by January 30.
“100% vaccination of students will help us in shifting from online education to offline. Now that the Covid cases are declining, and most students in higher classes have been inoculated, a proposal may be placed before the Delhi Disaster Management Authority (DDMA) for reopening schools,” said Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia.
Experts, parents speak
A Delhi education department official said they are keen on reopening schools. “We now have the example of Maharashtra, and there are global examples in favour of opening them. There is medical evidence that Covid affects young children less. But people who must make this decision have to do so based on logic and evidence and not perception,” the official said, referring to the DDMA.
“There needs to be more clarity on how we will handle this moving forward, at what stage these steps need to be taken. Between the second and third wave, there was a substantial time when we could have opened,” the official said.
Yamini Aiyar, president, Centre for Policy Research, said that by keeping schools closed to reduce the spread of Covid, the trade-off in terms of children’s learning is huge.
“When the pandemic first set in here, we experimented with a harsh lockdown and realised that the economic consequences are huge. When the second wave took place with the Delta variant, which was deadlier, we entered a more measured lockdown because we had learnt from past experience. We never made that choice for schools… One thing that has made governments recalcitrant has been elite voices, where there is an assumption that online learning can be a substitute. We found different ways to work around our economic lives sensibly. It would only make sense that we could have found different ways of opening schools with proper SOPs, and over time we would have found ways to overcome hesitancy as well. But there was nobody to lobby for this while traders’ associations and business owners’ associations lobbied hard to open the economy,” she said.
In the first survey to indicate how learning levels among children have been impacted because of schools being shut during the pandemic, the latest Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), conducted in March last year in rural Karnataka, showed that reading and numeracy skills among children have taken a big hit, especially among students in primary classes.
In the two years between 2018 and now, the survey found that the percentage of students in Class IV, for example, who cannot recognise even a letter in Kannada, went from 5.1% in 2018 to 12% in 2020. For students in Class I, this percentage went from 40.3% in 2018 to 56.8% in 2020.
Numeracy skills were impacted too. For example, the percentage of children in Class I who cannot recognise digits between 1 and 9 went up from 29.7% in 2014 to 42.6% in 2020. For Class V students, this figure was 2.3% in 2014 and now stands at 4.6%.
Several parents, too, have been petitioning against extended school closures.
In the last few months, lawyer Tanya Aggarwal has been balancing work, taking care of her six-year-old son, and keeping up with global research on school closure and its effect, and Covid in children. She is also a vocal advocate against extended and repeated closures especially at the primary level. To this end, she has been drafting petitions, gathering signatories for them, writing articles, and pushing for this on social media.
“A small group of us started thinking about it around February last year, which marked almost one year of school closure. But then the second wave hit. In June, we started efforts with full steam. Honestly, till then we had also been really scared, we didn’t know much about Covid and since online access itself was not a problem for my child, it hadn’t hit hard till then. For many, education is a ticket for upward mobility, it can define your life. I can’t believe so many children are being deprived of that on the pretext of online learning. Even for those with online access, the engagement is not meaningful especially for younger children. They learn so much from each other,” she said.
Currently, she is circulating a petition requesting Delhi authorities to open schools first when they move into lifting the current set of restrictions. She has gathered more than 1,000 signatories.
(With inputs from Ritu Sharma, Santanu Chowdhury & Pallavi Smart)
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