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New Delhi: Satish Yadav, a security guard at a mall in Faridabad, lost his job during the lockdown imposed amid the second Covid wave. The 45-year-old, a father of two, then began selling fruit on a push-up to support his family. The new job ensured a steady income but it was not enough to educate both their children. And, therefore, Yadav’s eldest child – the daughter – had to drop out of school.
“My daughter’s studies may take a few more years. I will be able to educate my son only with limited means and I want to focus on that right now,” Yadav said. His son studies in class 5th and daughter is a student of class 9th.
As a fruit-seller, he earns less than Rs 10,000 a month, while as a guard he earns almost double.
Suman Verma is a single mother of a daughter who is going to turn 18 next year. Verma, who hails from Delhi’s Nangloi area, does not want to send her daughter to school as she too lost a major part of her income during the lockdown.
Verma works as a domestic help and the lockdown cost her her job in the four houses she worked in. Verma now works as a helper and babysitter in only one household. While she used to earn Rs 15,000 a month earlier, she now earns only Rs 5,000 – which she said is enough to feed only herself and her daughter.
“I can’t send my daughter to school. She will turn 18 next year, I will marry her. I have saved some money for her wedding.”
Yadav and Verma are just two examples of how the pandemic – and the ensuing lockdown – affected education in India, especially for children from low- and middle-income families. And, information gathered anecdotally by ThePrint indicates that the girls have borne the brunt.
According to the Ministry of Education, 3.5 million children are currently out of school, including those who have dropped out during the pandemic. The ministry does not have consolidated data on the exact number of school drop-ups since March 2020 (when the Covid pandemic broke out in India) or the break-up of girls versus boys.
out of school children involve Those who have never enrolled in school, while those who drop out in the middle are dropouts.
The actual figure, however, is likely to be higher as states are still in the process of counting votes, ThePrint has learned, a task difficult for surveyors due to the pandemic.
Between January 2021 and the first week of October, data on 3.5 million children was shared with the ministry by the states after the Center asked states to identify out-of-school children.
In a letter to all the states, the government had said, “There is a wide gap in the identities of OOSCs (out of school children)… so that no child is left out.”
The data from the states is uploaded on ‘Prabandhan’, a portal launched by the ministry in June. According to him, the dropout rate is highest in Odisha (22 per cent), followed by Ladakh (over 18 per cent) and Nagaland (over 16 per cent).
State-level figures also indicate that the dropout rate is worrying.
In Maharashtra, For example, 25,000 children dropped out of school last year, according to a survey conducted by the state in the month of March. according to a report goodSo far 1.25 lakh children have been forced to drop out of school in Tamil Nadu due to the pandemic.
one more survey report good The ‘Emergency Report on Schooling’, led by economist Jean Dreze, also said that 37 percent of children in rural areas dropped out of school due to the pandemic. The survey was conducted in 15 states – Assam, Bihar, Delhi, Gujarat, Haryana, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Odisha, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal.
While the ministry’s figures do not give separate figures about the number of girls, shared by Bangalore-based NGO Ahwahan Foundation – which works with schools for low-income families across the country – It shows what ThePrint actually found. The dropout trend was mostly among lower-middle-class families, migrant laborers and vendors.
Of the 1,702 children in the schools that Ahwahan supports in Bangalore, 252 dropped out during Covid. Of these, 179 were girls. Similar is the situation in Tamil Nadu and Kerala, where 809 out of a total of 3,610 students dropped out of which 565 were girls.
Similarly, in Odisha and West Bengal, out of 3,864 students in Aawahan-supported schools, 836 students dropped out during Covid and 543 of them were girls.
Meanwhile, in Mumbai, 126 out of 1,603 children dropped out and 98 of them were girls.
Read also: Take responsibility for self-prescribed books- Ministry of Education issues guidelines to schools
‘Parents are planning to get them married’
Prashant Barik, who looks after schools run under the Awahan Foundation in West Bengal, Odisha and Assam, said, “People were dropping their children from school last year too, but the trend has increased significantly in the last few months.”
“In the schools we work in, we have seen that many girls drop out after class 9 and 10. Some of them called us later and told that their parents are planning to get them married and sought our help to stop it. ,” she added.
“These parents are not only vendors and daily wage earners but also those who had private jobs and have lost their jobs due to Covid.”
Manasi Jena, a vehicle volunteer working in Mumbai claimed that she found cases in Thane schools where students were taken to the brink of suicide due to financial issues of their family.
“A lot of parents lost their jobs during Covid… Vegetable shop vendors, house workers and daily wage laborers were unable to earn any money during the lockdown. They tell us that they will educate their sons and not their daughters. We face a lot of difficulties in explaining to the parents. The students went into depression and tried to commit suicide and we had to counsel them,” Jena said.
Instead of sending them to school, the parents asked them to help them find jobs for their children in their NGO, he said.
Another vehicle volunteer, Nivedita RS, who works in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, also said she has faced cases where parents want to marry off their young daughters as they can no longer afford to teach them. Can.
And like Yadav and Verma, other parents who spoke to ThePrint but spoke on condition of anonymity said that due to low incomes, they would prefer to work and contribute to the family’s earnings rather than send their children to school. . Several young daughters said that they were keen to marry him and therefore preferred to pursue domestic skills rather than studies.
A Kasaragod parent told ThePrint on the condition of anonymity, “My daughter has already completed her 10th standard and I cannot afford to teach her further. I am planning to marry her as soon as she turns 18.”
Read also: No one knows the future of our ‘out of school’ children. Enrollment data is insufficient
‘Very serious problem’
Professor R Govinda, Distinguished Professor of the Council for Social Development and former Vice-Chancellor of the National University of Educational Planning, said the problem of drop-out of children from schools is “very serious” and is not being addressed enough.
“There are two categories of children who have dropped out during the pandemic – the poor who became poor and had to drop out. In such a situation, the girl child has to bear the brunt of the financial burden. The second category is children from lower middle class families who were admitted to budget private schools. Since most budget private schools have closed, many children have had to drop out,” he told ThePrint.
Niharika Singh, a project officer at the Center for Social Research, an organization working on women’s empowerment, agreed that girls dropping out of school have increased during the pandemic.
He said that while working in Haryana, he noticed that girls were married off early because their parents could no longer send them to school.
“The impact of the pandemic is clearly visible among young women and girls. There is no such recorded study but we have found anecdotal evidence. Pre-pandemic we were able to bring many girls to schools in Haryana, but the situation has become worse,” Singh said.
In a policy brief in January by the Right to Education Forum, it was also estimated that 1 crore girls There is a danger of dropping out of school because of the pandemic. The report said the pandemic could “put girls at risk of early marriage, trafficking and poverty”.
Read also: Cabinet approves continuation of Samagra Shiksha Yojana for school education till March 2026
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