Let’s not make education a pandemic casualty

Mumbai district ranks top in districts with low enrolment in UG courses this academic year. File pic

Is education in danger of being relegated to the sidelines as an outcome of the pandemic? With jobs uncertain and incomes either spent on more immediate needs or saved for a rainy day, most people seem to have put education on the list of non-essentials.

A report in this paper has numbers that should worry us. India's gross enrolment ratio for higher than school level education is already abysmal, at 27.4 per cent. Going below that would mean having a large swathe of a generation with just basic literacy. This cannot be the future of a rapidly developing country.

The report states that the past year has seen a drop in admissions in undergraduate and post-graduate courses. In Mumbai University itself, which has jurisdiction over seven districts, admissions to undergraduate courses dropped by 19 per cent in the past year, causing the university Senate to call for a meeting to discuss the worrying numbers.

Among the reasons for low admissions to even undergraduate courses was the loss of income, the inability of families to afford expensive technology for online learning, full fees demanded by colleges, etc. The Senate has demanded that the university form a committee to seek financial aid from the government for poor students.

While one can blame the university's late response on the uncertainty caused by the pandemic, it nevertheless had the wherewithal to act a lot sooner. Offering easy fee payment options could have been a major factor in at least halting the dropout rate.

The government, too, cannot ignore this very real problem and needs to quickly step up and allot funds to mitigate this crisis. If not addressed immediately, this issue has the potential of becoming a lot more difficult to tackle than it currently is.