Covid 19 has dug up many glitches in governance and incongruities in societies, laying them bare on the surface. Among them is the plight of lakhs of children who are left out of the new norm of education which has gone online. It is not a case of one Shariba, daughter of school bus driver and a class 9 student, sitting idle in Bahraich district of UP even as her classmates are attending online classes; it repeats itself with 10-year-old Yash who lives in a two-room hutment with his widowed mother and elder brother in a basti in South Delhi with no means to attend classes; it is replicated with Payal Gawai, a teenage student in Akola in Maharashtra, who hanged herself unable to attend classes in the absence of a cellphone; it finds resonance in Aparna, a Class 1 student in  a school in Kozhikode in Kerala, who glances through her text books as her peers are attending classes on TV. The names of such unfortunate students across the country would run into tens of thousands of pages. 

Available information in this regard is an eye-opener. In Uttar Pradesh, only 15% of children surveyed across 11 districts watched educational TV shows or programmes for educational purposes; most children reported having a phone at home but only 22% had access. In Kerala, the most literate State, a survey has identified 2.61 lakh students who have no access to smartphones, televisions or internet. In Maharashtra, a report revealed that around 2.5 lakh children dropped out after passing Class IX in 2020-21. In other states too, the situation is equally grim or worse. 

Virtual schooling has exposed the glaring digital gap existing in the country. The inaccessibility of internet and non-availability of smart phones for the underprivileged children could derail the motto of universal education. Over the years, a lot of efforts have been made to boost the enrolment rate in schools. Whatever success made seems to have been washed out with students, mostly from lower middle class and underprivileged sections, dropping out for one or other reason during the Covid time. With workers in droves losing jobs, children of a lesser God are forced to join the workforce and take up any work permissible by their tiny hands to add to the family’s income kitty. For people, who are already in a hand-to-mouth condition, one option for survival is to ask everyone in the family to look for work. This does not exclude children. 

Right to Education does not mean much to children from the lower strata of society unless they are provided with the means to attend classes. Smart phones, TVs and internet have become sine qua non for education. However, owning even a single smart phone in a family of two or three students is beyond their reach for people of lower income groups. The government, which has a step-motherly treatment towards education with paltry allocation in every budget, has to pull its socks up. Smart phones for students are no less important than vaccines in this Covid time. They should be made available to the ‘left-out’ students so that they too become part of the online education. Apart from efforts at government-level, attempts should be mounted at local/panchayat/institutional levels so that not a single student is left out of the online education which has become the new norm.