Blog
Team Social Xleration, 30th December 2020
As the country picks up pieces and gets back to the normal from the unprecedented impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, we witnessed some great use of imagination to ensure that life continued even in the abnormal times. This is also true of school education in India, especially the rural regions. While the majority of the schools in India largely remain shut, the education and teaching community in many places came up with creative non-tech learning methods to surmount the challenge of low internet penetration.
Satyanarayan Sharma, who manages a school in the Jhamri village of Haryana’s Jhajjar district latched on to the traditional public broadcasting system in rural India to deliver education. A loudspeaker was mounted onto a cart with a teacher, which would arrive in the village and the teacher would impart lessons to the students, who would sit in their homes and take notes thus ensuring the practice of social distance as well. The teachers took turns to deliver lessons to the children from a strategic location in the village to ensure maximum coverage. The effort while not the best one did ensure that children did not lose out on education even in the testing time.
In the beautiful hill state of Sikkim in north-east India, which was also reeling under the effect of the pandemic, Indra Mukhi Chhetri, a Mathematics and Science teacher based in a small village in South Sikkim district did not get bogged down by the pandemic and instead started visiting homes of her students to impart individual lessons to them. A teacher at the VCGL Senior Secondary School in Ravangla, she would start at 9 am and teach lessons on subjects such as Mathematics, Science, English, and General Knowledge. Her initiative was borne out of her concern for the people in her village, who are mainly farmers and some of them very poor, and hence, education of their children was even more of a priority for them than in urban areas. Indra’s effort created a movement across the state when the word reached the state education officials on her simple yet effective initiative. The State Government scaled up the effort at the state level and named it “home-schooling for elementary education”. The State Education Department identified the locations of the teachers and allocated them areas for imparting individual home education sessions.
In the Rayagada and Kalahandi of Odisha, Livolink Foundation, an associate of Tata Trusts ensured that 237 schools were kept operational despite the pandemic. The Foundation formed Covid Community Education Group (CCEG), a village-level group comprising panchayat members, anganwadi, and parents to keep the schools going. Many youths enrolled in colleges outside of their villages, who returned to the villages during the lockdown, were brought on board as “village volunteers” and were entrusted the task of teaching the children. These volunteers received training from the local education officials. Livolink ensured that textbooks and education material was supplied to the schools by working with district authorities and convinced reluctant parent to send children for the classes as they are held in open spaces.
Solapur city in Maharashtra saw a resourceful approach to impart education to not so well off children. Many of the students of Asha Marathi Vidyalaya primary school in Nilamnagar of Solapur, who belong to underprivileged background, could not afford mobile phones and were deprived of attending online classes. So, the school started an innovative way of painting lessons from textbooks on the outer walls of the houses in the area to enable access to such students while ensuring social distancing guidelines. The effort saw 300 outer walls of various houses getting painted with simplified lessons from textbooks of various subjects of Classes 1 to 10. The step has benefitted 1,700 students enrolled in the Asha Marathi Vidyalaya primary school and its secondary section, Shri Dharmanna Sadul Prashala.
A somewhat similar effort was reported by UNICEF thousands of kilometers away in St. Andrew in Jamaica, where a teacher scribbled lessons on community house walls to teach to the local children. This and the above examples signify that a few determined educators across the world continued to use their imagination and ceaselessly toil for the betterment of their students even in the face of the pandemic.
In the Indian context, the above non-tech initiatives, although not perfect pedagogically, are of high significance. The Covid-19 only reinforced the disparity in internet access and thus, an inability to access online education by a sizeable number of children. As per the findings of the National Sample Survey 2017-18, just 14.9 percent of rural, and 42 percent of urban households have access to an internet connection. When it came to computers, only 4.4 percent of rural households and 23.4 percent of urban households have access to the same. Moreover, in rural India, only a quarter of people own a smartphone. Thus, while it is desirable that every child, especially in rural India and slum locations in the urban area, get access to online education, we are still a long way for ensuring access to the internet to all students in the country.
In this scenario, the focus should be on providing access to non-tech educational tools and methods to the children in areas with low internet access. This can be gradually complemented by low-tech solutions. The educators who came up with innovative solutions on the ground need to be made a stakeholder in the education delivery plans comprising workable and refined non-tech and low-tech tools and methods at the state and nation level along with policy-makers, government education officials, NGOs, and other prominent stakeholders. This would contribute immensely to ensuring that not even a single child is left out of the educational landscape because of being on the wrong side of the digital divide.