Covid in India – Children have forgotten how to read

Radhika Kumari holds her chalk with determination, almost willing the letters out of her mind onto the black slate.

But they tumble out slowly and she misidentifies many of them.

Radhika is trying to write the Hindi alphabet, a simple task for most 10-year olds. But, she says, she is struggling because it has been 17 months since she attended a class, online or offline.

Like everywhere else in India, schools have remained shut since March last year when the country went into lockdown to curb the spread of Covid-19.

Affluent private schools and their students switched to online classes seamlessly, but government-run schools have struggled. And their students – often with no laptops or smartphones and patchy access to the internet – have fallen behind.

In Jharkhand, a largely tribal, poor state where Radhika lives, this digital divide is stark. Her family is Dalit (formerly untouchable) and at the bottom of a deeply discriminatory Hindu caste system – as is most of the village.

There is no internet in her tiny village in Latehar district. Government or state-owned broadcasters have been running educational shows in some states but that’s still inaccessible for many communities.

As schools started reopening in some states, economist Jean Dreze met Radhika and 35 other children in her village to assess learning loss in underprivileged communities. The survey took into account learning materials and extra classes, teacher visits, online learning and parents’ education level among other things.

“It was really shocking to find that out of 36 children enrolled at the primary level, 30 were not able to read a single word,” Mr Dreze said.

He added that the survey found that most primary schoolchildren had started to fall behind in reading and writing and had almost no access to learning materials.

“Hindi and English were my favourite subjects in school,” Radhika says. There is little she remembers of either language now.

She was finishing class two at the local government-run primary school when Covid struck. She has now progressed to class four despite not having access to learning tools throughout the pandemic year. BBC