40% primary school students in Kolkata could not access classes during pandemic: study

Source: The Hindu

About 40% primary school students could not attend online classes during the COVID-19 pandemic owing to the digital divide, a report published by Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen’s Pratichi (India) Trust found. The study was accumulated on the basis of experiences shared by hundreds of teachers across 21 State-run primary schools in Kolkata. “There are two components to the digital divide — one is affordability, and whether the families of students can afford devices that are required for digital learning. The second issue is regular accessibility of uninterrupted data, which again has an element of expenditure,” Sabir Ahamed, national research coordinator, Pratichi (India) Trust, and one of the authors of the report said. The findings are based on experiences over six months during the first wave of the pandemic (April to November 2020) shared by primary school teachers. The study highlights the huge impact on the teaching-learning process, which underwent a sea change after the pandemic.“So long, the focus was on registering as many students as possible and reducing the number of missing children, but the pandemic has brought a situation where the school has gone missing,” the report.The other sponsors to the report include Manabi Majumdar, Urba Chaudhuri, Kakali Das De and Sutapa Ghosh, among others.

According to the teachers, the gaps in learning have widened and are diverse due to multiple factors, including the education and income of parents.

“For students attending State-run schools, institutional learning was the primary focus. However, the pandemic forced children to depend on their parents for learning support. Since many children are first generation learners, the impact on learning for primary school students was more severe,” Mr. Ahamed said.

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