On 1 June, Devika Balakrishnan, a 14-year-old student from the Dalit community, allegedly took her own life in Valancheri, a village in the Malappuram district of Kerala. According to news reports, her family said that she was distressed that they could not afford a mobile phone for her to access online classes being conducted by her school.
Ever since Prime Minister Narendra Modi imposed a countrywide lockdown, more than two months earlier, to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus, several educational institutes have switched to an online mode of education. While the government has portrayed this as a positive shift, students across the country have voiced concerns on social media that it is exclusionary and a hurdle in accessing education for those from marginalised communities, poor families and those who live in rural areas.
Several students, mostly from rural areas, who are pursuing undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Uttar Pradesh and Delhi, echoed these concerns. They told me that accessing online classes has been the biggest challenge for them during the lockdown. Most of them either live in areas where internet connectivity is weak or do not have the required devices to enable online streaming of classes. This is especially worrisome as the ongoing lockdown coincides with the end of the academic year—college students in India typically prepare and appear for end-semester examinations between March and July. The situation is more severe for final-year students, as they have to prepare for entrance examinations to pursue further studies, look for jobs, and submit their dissertations, too, during this period. Students told me they are worried about their future as they have been unable to study due to their inability to attend classes online and other difficulties that crept up with the imposition of the lockdown.
Nearly all the students I spoke to witnessed immense chaos in their academic lives in the last ten days of March. “I am very worried about my studies,” Gudiya Yadav, a final-year post-graduate student at the Banaras Hindu University in Uttar Pradesh, told me. Yadav left the university campus on 20 March, and had gone back home to Harauli village in Uttar Pradesh’s Ghazipur district. She did not carry her books and study material as she thought she would soon be returning to campus. This year, along with her final college examinations, she has to appear for the National Eligibility Test, which qualifies candidates for teaching posts and research fellowships, including the Junior Research Fellowship, a scheme of the University Grants Commission. “I was working hard this time to clear JRF,” Yadav told me. “But this lockdown has crushed my dreams.”
Like Yadav, Aniket Kumar, a final-year student at the University of Delhi’s Sri Venkateswara College, also said that he thought he would soon go back to campus. On 10 March, Kumar went back home to Patna, Bihar’s capital, for Holi. “I thought everything will be alright in 21 days and did not know it would last so long.” As Kumar also did not carry his books back home, he said, “I am not able to study properly.”
Ipshita is a student of a five-year course in technology at the Indian Institute of Technology at BHU. She went home, to Delhi’s Uttam Nagar, for Holi and then went back to college. On 21 March, after the university stopped conducting classes as a precaution against the novel coronavirus, Ipshita went back home. “We got a mail that we will have online exams and that we have to submit all the assignments online. But we were told all this later.” Ipshita, too, said that she thought that this would be a matter of a few days. “So, I didn’t bring my laptop and now I am not able to work on my dissertation.” She added, “Most students had not completed their research work by then. It’s unlikely that the research projects will be of good quality.”
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