impact on education
https://scroll.in/article/1044264/pushed-out-of-school-in-the-pandemic-they-now-stitch-shoes
Data shows that the pandemic severely disrupted the education of children in India, as it did of children across the world. A 2021 UNICEF report noted that in India, the “closure of 1.5 million schools due to the pandemic and lockdowns in 2020 has impacted 247 million children enrolled in elementary and secondary schools”. It further estimated that 9 million children were at risk of being pushed into child labour by the end of 2022 as a result of the pandemic.
“Children from marginalised groups were already at risk of dropping out even before the lockdown struck,” said Ankit Vyas, an independent education consultant and co-author of a report published by OXFAM on the impact of the pandemic on education. “With physical closure of schools and lack of access to education, their dropping out of education became inevitable.”
22/02/2023
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VbalqF7kkg
In an interview about what he calls a “once in a century crisis” which hasn’t got anywhere near the media attention it requires and deserves, the Vice-Chancellor of the Azim Premji University says schools are struggling to recover the learning students lost during the two years of Covid when schools were either shut or not fully functioning. Although there are schools where “near complete recovery” has been achieved there are many where there is practically no recovery and many where it is patchy and very incomplete.
10/12/2022
How Hindutva Is Changing History and Science Textbooks in Schools Christophe Jaffrelot May 8, 2022 https://janataweekly.org/how-hindutva-is-changing-history-and-science-textbooks-in-schools/
culture minister, Mahesh Sharma,commissioned a 14 member committee to produce a “holistic study of origin and evolution of Indian culture since 12,000 years before present and its interface with other cultures of the world.”.. it was coupled with the persistent effort by Hindu nationalists to present their mythology as history. ..Second, uncovering evidence from ancient history aimed “to prove that today’s Hindus are directly descended from the land’s first inhabitants many thousands of years ago” and thereby give Hindu nationalists arguments to claim a sort of superiority.
The former minister of state for human resource development Ram Shankar Katheria had said two years before, “There will be saffronisation of education and of the country. Whatever is good for the country will certainly happen, be it saffronisation or sanghwaad (propagation of the RSS ideology).” ..
According to The Indian Express, repeated interventions from the minister of human resource development (Prakash Javadekar, another RSS member) resulted in 1,334 changes in 182 textbooks originally put out by the NCERT, 68 without following the procedures that should have involved the NCERT and its experts.
These changes once again enhanced ancient Indian history (in terms of medicine, astronomy, yoga, etc) and major Hindu figures from the past (Maharana Pratap, Shivaji, Aurobindo, Vivekananda, etc.) at the expense of “the Muslim era.” Such alterations were not only made to history text- books. ..To foster assimilation of knowledge that amounted to propaganda, final exams have increasingly focused on the heroic deeds of Hindu icons and reforms initiated by the Modi government, even on the person of the prime minister. The economics exam at Lucknow University for the bachelor of commerce (BCom) asked students to evaluate schemes launched by Modi, such as Digital India (to develop digitisation throughout the country) and Startup India, or to describe job- creation schemes.