Amidst the gale of COVID, in April this year, the New York Governor Andrew Cuomo quoted Winston Churchill, “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning”. Today this statement uncannily holds true for the COVID situation in India as well.
As India begins to gradually free itself from–what has been dubbed as–one of the severest lockdowns in the world, a little bit of soul-searching becomes pertinent. Were we able to flatten the right curve (or the wrong one, as Rajiv Bajaj opined)? Was the mere “vocabulary of law and order” sufficient in containing the spread of the bug? Did the Epidemic Diseases Act 1897 and the Disaster Management Act 2005 make for the dearth of a comprehensive legal framework for health emergencies? Save these questions for another time. For now let’s focus on the impact of COVID on education, and our response towards it–the case in point being Kashmir.
That we are witnessing a moment of epochal crisis in education is hardly lost on anyone. While we have had some ballpark figures for economic losses–with J&K alone suffering a whopping 10000 crores loss in last two months–we have hardly been able to quantify the social cost of the pandemic. Say, how much has it costed our children in terms of their career prospectus and well-being? While elsewhere alternative pedagogical paradigms based on digital power are being mooted, Kashmir is forced to witness a window dressing of sorts in this regard.
In 2019 itself more than 55% of Internet shutdowns in India happened in Kashmir alone. Since August last year the high speed internet has been denied to Kashmiris. Given all this, directing teachers and students to shift to platforms like Zoom is like trying to “put a jewelled crown on the head of a man without trousers”. A teacher told this writer that out of the allotted 30 minute session 20 minutes were being wasted to get the connection right. Moreover just 1 to 2% of students possessed back-end facilities so as to be able to actually access the platform. This has led to a confusion among teachers, students and parents alike. The question remains: has the administration bothered to conduct an impact assessment here so far? No. The “airy nothings” continue.
With the union HRD minister, R.N. Pokhriyal, suggesting that the education institutions might reopen only after August 15, various initiatives have been taken up by the government to keep the education sector ticking. Under the Atal Innovation Mission “Tinker From Home” campaign, CollabCAD and Game Development Module have been launched to help children keep themselves fruitfully occupied during lockdowns. The MHRD has also launched VidyaDaan 2.0 as a digital solution to increasing requirement for e-learning content for students and teachers in the backdrop of COVID-19. But what does all this mean for a Kashmiri teacher or a student? Well, no marks for guessing.
In April 2020 the UNESCO launched the “Global Education Coalition” (GEC), with a hashtag #LearningNeverStops. The members of the coalition include WHO, UNHCR, ILO, FAO, Microsoft, Google etc. As per UNESCO, 60% of world’s student population has directly been impacted by the lockdowns, with other localised closures impacting millions of additional learners. To bring education back from disruption to recovery, the UNESCO emphasises on the investment in remote learning and advocates establishment of approaches to develop more open and flexible education systems for future. Also, together with UNICEF, World Food Programme and World Bank, UNESCO has issued guidelines on safe reopening of schools in post-COVID era. The linchpin of all these advocacies lies in the standardisation of digital learning practices and the evolution of hybrid learning models. Again, where do we Kashmiris feature in all this? Obviously nowhere.
The UN Women recently came up with the term “shadow pandemic” as COVID lockdowns have led to a spike in gender violence, especially in the domestic sphere. This “shadow” has no doubt cast a gloom on our children also. The J&K High Court took a suo moto cognizance of the domestic violence cases during lockdown and issued an order on 16th April 2020 to that effect. One can only hope that this magnanimity of the Honourable Court comes to the rescue of Kashmir’s student community as well. The truth is that the students here have been left much behind the curve. As the internet gag–a sort of snake oil prescription–continues to kill possibilities in Kashmir, the government has not yet been able to figure out whether internet is a part of the problem or a part of the solution.
Salvaging education in Kashmir will begin with the loosening of levers on internet. The more we throttle it the heavier we will be sitting on the throats of our children, and yes, less forgiving they might turn out to be in future towards us.