Commentary | Jayabrata Sarkar, Education in Standby Mode: The Digital Divide and Online Learning in India during COVID
As India continues to struggle with the catastrophic health impacts of Covid-19, a crisis is unfolding in school education across the country. India went into lockdown in March 2020 as the central government took drastic measures to contain the spread of the pandemic, such as banning large-scale congregations in public places. One such measure was closing down one of the largest school systems in the world. As the months passed by with students out of the classroom, the pandemic exposed a stark reality of educational disparity in India: the digital divide between the poor and the better-off students in the country. Though no official figures are available, observers have estimated that a total of 320 million learners (nearly 60% of school going children) have either been left behind or have faced insurmountable difficulties in accessing e-learning through online classes. Unequal access to E-learning in times of the Covid pandemic has proved to be yet another example of the long-standing issues of inequality that the poor face in terms of denial or lack of accessibility to resources and public services on a daily basis in India.
“Unequal access to E-learning in times of the Covid pandemic has proved to be yet another example of the long-standing issues of inequality that the poor face in terms of denial or lack of accessibility to resources and public services on a daily basis in India. ”
Perceptions of the pandemic have determined the Indian state’s response. The subsequent measures that the government has undertaken have had a consequent effect on shaping a post-pandemic society which would have overarching implications on everyday material and social life of the masses. The pandemic as it ravaged across the country has appeared in the first instance as a life-threatening and then, as it subsequently plateaued, a life-altering spectacle. It is increasingly being viewed as an appearance with perpetual visibility that urgently needs an action plan. However, the pandemic response policy has obfuscated the socio-economic alienation of the poor. Visible even on normal activity days, the new Covid normal has superimposed an authoritative political discourse justifying the limiting, restrictive control over freedom and rights of the poor, and thereby depriving them of actual control over their material world and personal life. Newer boundaries of social exclusion have reinforced the current order of everyday exploitation of the masses.
In the sphere of school education, the Covid pandemic has made invisible the actual condition of the educational system. It has silenced the needs and concerns of the poor and made the state’s top-down Covid-19 induced “digital education model” an all-powerful protocol based on unilateral communication dictate to be followed.
As schools across states in India embraced a newly-evolved and hurriedly-conceived online mode to classroom teaching and instruction, the normal active classroom setting was quickly displaced by tablets, websites, and applications. With immediate effect, the technological reliance on online classrooms blurred the physical boundaries of school, classroom, teachers, and students, but at the same time highlighted social and economic limits to the disadvantage of the students belonging to the economically weaker section of society. If e-learning is the new normal, and relies exclusively on the availability and accessibility of technology, then currently enrolled poor school students have virtually no access to digital infrastructure. In rural India only a handful of students (4%) have access to this crucial technology. Though access is better in urban areas (23%), almost 80% lack access to computers with internet.
While there is no dearth of aspiration as poor parents have enrolled their children in English-medium Low-Cost Private Schools (LCPS) and government aided schools, the plight of the poor has been most pronounced in accessing a smartphone, a mobile device to access online classes. More often than not, poor parents took out a loan to buy a smartphone because they did not want “their son” to miss out on learning. As this suggests, girls have been largely left out as the male child is prioritized and girls face increasing burdens of domestic duties during the pandemic. There have been occasions where poor families have been burdened with smartphone loans and have found it difficult to afford the required monthly data. It has upset their tight household budget, leaving insufficient money to buy groceries. Often, one smartphone is to be shared among siblings in households not free from distraction. By the time the phone exchanges hands it is too late as data has expired or it takes time for websites to load. Many models of remote instruction rely in part on parents as educators when in fact many parents from low-income groups are required to work outside the home, are uneducated or poorly educated, and have limited technological proficiency to use online classroom software available on the smartphone. Digital infrastructure is in crisis as second-hand smartphones are in high demand. But such a phone with a cracked or broken screen means that the touchscreen can, at best, operate intermittently. Aside from the quality of the device available, there is the endemic problem of stable internet connections. Patchy connections lead to constant buffering of instructional videos, diminishing students’ interest. In sum, there is no digital readiness at home and that has affected school performance of poor students.
As Covid pandemic cases have dropped significantly, schools across the country are being opened in a phased manner with Covid protocol restrictions. Still, poor students yet again face a new challenge to accessing education. Often, the students are being taught online but have to sit in a designated physical space allocated for online classes. To fulfil the requirements of physical online class lectures, low cost strategies adopted by the government-aided and low fee private schools have achieved little in terms of either physical or digital infrastructure. Infrastructural inadequacy appears in the form of temporary make-shift arrangements or inhospitable housing conditions. Students attending such schools are more likely to experience inconsistent electricity and poor internet connections, which deter online teaching. E-learning modules that are being provided to students cannot replicate the various dialects, varied contexts, or different lived experiences that are brought together by a physical, interactive classroom. In fact, the software does not accommodate one-to-one discussions or problems solving with tutors. Further, when students enter the internet classroom, some struggle to decipher the virtual curriculum, that is, audio instructional assignments and notes, class instructions etc. This assumes ominous proportions when students who are new to the web and do not know the digital process fail to understand and express the concepts, or to learn and upload assignments to be evaluated. This situation of helplessness is rampant even as the teacher is on a self-learning course to digitally devise new assessment techniques.
Facing the grim prospect of poor students’ inability to grasp and understand online lecturers and uploading assignments, the government schools have adopted remedial classes. This is a damage-control measure to bridge the huge learning gaps observed after school closures and that have now assumed unmanageable proportions. However, the term ‘remedial classes’ has created an invisible dividing line of exclusion and categorization among a larger section of poor students. Biased and stereotyped socio-cultural values predominate among instructors and teachers as it is assumed that poor students who attend online classes are lackluster, reluctant and unintelligent, absent from class, and belong to families where education is not valued or accorded priority.
Assessing the state of under-preparedness of government agencies to tackle online education during the pandemic reveals a hard truth that must be acknowledged. In the short-term, the government would have to find alternative plans to educate poor students. Considering the volume of poor students enrolled in government schools, providing digital application-based devices such as tablets and smartphones (one per family) may not be possible. Yet, to ensure the primary objective of fair and equal access to online education, the government must focus on a set of priorities. It must make effective use of e-Learning infrastructure which hosts a set of digital platforms and applications such as Swayam, Shiksha Van, E-Pathshala and the National Repository of Open Educational Resources, all of which are devised and tailor-made to disseminate ideas, conduct online classes and take online assessment-based examinations. The central government must coordinate with state governments across the country to invest in the construction of reliable internet networks readily accessible through mobile hotspots. It must provide funds to government to buy digital screens and to earmark a space for an internet-based digital classroom. Since the onset of online education, teachers have been expected to not only teach online, but also to act as mentors guiding students to comprehend digital application-based evaluation cum assessment modules. Thus a new pedagogy of school education is required. Lastly, copies of lectures, modules and assessment-based tasks must be available to poor students to ensure continuity during online classes. Only then will India be able to recover from its crisis of educational digital divide exposed by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Dr. Jayabrata Sarkar is an Associate Professor employed in Deshbandhu College, University of Delhi. His research areas include marginality, exclusion, identity politics, nationalism, and populism.
To cite this essay, please use the entry suggested below:
Jayabrata Sarkar, “Education in Standby Mode: The Digital Divide and Online Learning in India during COVID,” criticalasianstudies.org Commentary Board, December 6, 2021; https://doi.org/10.52698/VAXJ9067.