COVID Has Made Many Kids In West Bengal Dropouts, But There's No Official Data On That

The Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Rules, 2010 mandate that the local administration must maintain a record of all children aged 0-14 years, including information on the school and class they are enrolled in, if they have dropped out of school and the reasons for the same. Rules also mandate that the record must be updated annually through a door-to-door household survey, and out of school children must be provided special training/ measures to address their requirements.

Evidently, the surveys are designed to identify cases of dropouts or out of school children, which increase as children proceed from primary to middle to high school, data from precious years show. But while several news reports and research studies indicate that the COVID-19 pandemic has caused a spike in dropout rates and contributed to child labour and child marriage, especially among girls, there is little or no official data on dropouts. The Unified District Information System for Education Plus database under the Ministry of Education was last updated in 2019-20, before the pandemic arrived in India.

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The gap in official data is largely because most states 每 education is a state subject 每 did not initiate household surveys as mandated in the RTE rules during the pandemic fearing a spike in infection rates and heightened vulnerability for personnel conducting surveys.

In such circumstances, experiences from an ongoing door-to-door survey in Asansol, West Bengal as mandated under the rules show that the pandemic has severely disrupted the usual survey methodology and introduced numerous challenges, affecting accuracy and reliability of generated data. Policy experts said the lack of comprehensive, reliable data on school dropouts was severely affecting government efforts to plan and implement interventions addressing emerging concerns, including the heightened vulnerability of girls from poor, marginalized communities to child marriage.

Blow to education, childhood

While some reports indicated that children were at greater risk in the subsequent third wave of the pandemic, activists and civil society groups in West Bengal contended that the real impact of the pandemic on children lay in their complete disengagement with education.

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※Schools here are shut since April 2020, barring between February and April 2021, when some classes were held for grades 9-12. This has severely affected children＊s education 每 especially those from poor, marginalized backgrounds, whose parents are not educated, who don＊t have the means to send them for private tuitions,§ said Sourav Roy, Secretary, Democratic Students Organization, which is among several groups in the state demanding a reopening of schools.

Roy and his colleagues said they had noticed a sharp spike in instances of children accompanying their parents for work since the first wave, and such children were unlikely to return to school even when schools reopened. ※The threat facing girls is greater, because families often feel that at least their daughter will be able to eat and live well after marriage. Plus, there would be one less mouth to feed at home,§ said Roy.

Their concerns were corroborated in reports in the Bengali media, which stated that even beneficiaries of Kanyashree, the state government＊s scholarship scheme for girl children in school, were working alongside their parents, or had been married off in the past year and a half.

Disruption in survey methodology

While surveys to identify dropouts as mandated in the Right to Education rules are generally conducted in August-September every year, no survey was conducted in West Bengal in 2020, whereas the process has been kickstarted in some areas this year. But several people associated with the survey in Asansol, West Bengal＊s second largest city, said the usual survey methodology was severely disrupted by the pandemic and related restrictions.

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This is because normally, school teachers made a note of children who remained absent from school long periods, which was collated by the school management and passed on to para teachers. The latter then undertook home visits, often in close collaboration with Integrated Child Development Scheme personnel and other community workers to assess if children had dropped out from school, and the reasons for the same.

But the suspension of physical classes in state since April 2020 meant that teachers were unaware about instances of discontinuation in education. ※I have not met students physically once for over a year and a half, and only about 10-15 percent attend online classes. So even I am in the dark about whether students are keeping up with studies,§ said a government school teacher, requesting anonymity.

Para teachers said this complicated and added to their work burden as they had to visit nearly all homes likely to have cases of dropout, instead of visiting homes of children who did not attend school for long periods. They also had to contend with lack of clear guidelines and communication from the administration during the ongoing survey, which introduced fresh challenges, they said.

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※Every year before the survey, the local School Inspector briefs us about protocols, including the base date from which we are supposed to compute the age of children. But this year, no such meeting was organized, neither was there a mention of the base date in the official order, which created much confusion,§ said Narendra Moitra, para teacher in the Gourandi Ramkrishna Soibolini Institution in Asansol.

Moitra and other para teachers said it took them weeks to clarify the base date with the School Inspector＊s office, which was communicated to them verbally, leaving open the scope for discrepancy. Para teachers were also asked to collect information on all children aged 0-14 years and 14-18 years in their area in addition to dropouts during the ongoing survey, but were not provided with a list of such children.

※It took us nearly a month to collect data from different sources including administrative offices on households with children aged 0-14 years in their area, which we had to visit. This not only delayed the survey process but required us to work in closer collaboration with ICDS workers and booth level officers, who have a deep understanding of and familiarity with the local community§ said Baby Parween, para teacher in the Rabbania Girls High School in Asansol.

Hazards of home visit, gaps in data

Kana Mukherjee, a retired ICDS worker who undertook home visits for survey work with para teachers, noted that in many cases, families did not let her and her colleagues enter their homes, forget providing information about whether their children had dropped out of school.

※Most families were reluctant to engage with us, possibly because they were scared of infection. Many did not open the door, and many others accused us of being child-lifters. Many also asked to see ID cards saying we were surveyors 每 which we do not have＃We had to persuade them a lot, and explain our position and the purpose of the survey in detail to earn their trust. Even then, in many cases, we failed to collect the required information,§ said Mukherjee.

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Para teachers like Moitra and Parween who undertook home visits echoed Mukherjee＊s concerns. They said the proportion of people who did not provide information was far larger than pre-pandemic years, which meant the data generated during the survey was incomplete.

Even then, Mukherjee and her colleagues were able to identify four dropouts in the assigned area despite the constraints and challenges. All four were girls, in variation with dropout trends in the state from previous years that show the rate is nearly same for boys and girls 每 but these figures were provisional, and one girl＊s name was subsequently struck off from the list, although her younger sister＊s name featured in it.

In fact, the case of the sisters named Poonam Harijan and Suman Harijan shows that while the pandemic was contributing to school dropout and child labour, all instances were unlikely to be recorded in official databases. Both sisters were students in class 9 at the National Institute of Open Schooling in Asansol before schools were closed on account of the pandemic. They lived with and were supported by their mother Radha Harijan, who worked in several households through the day to earn Rs. 5000; her husband abandoned the family when the girls were still little.

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Radha Harijan was keen that the girls continue their studies ※as that is the only way to progress,§ whereas the school they were enrolled in offered free education, including textbooks. ※But the school is closed since April last year, and we have been pushed deeper into poverty as I lost work in some households,§ said Radha Harijan, who shares a one room tenement in a barrack with her two daughters.

※We don＊t have money to pay fees for private schools, or to buy mobile phones for online classes. In fact, since our mother＊s earnings took a hit after the pandemic, we had to take up work alongside her to support household expenses,§ said Suman Harijan.

Although both the Harijan sisters were completely detached from formal education for a long period, and entered the ranks of child labour in the early months of the pandemic, only Suman＊s name featured in the revised provisional list of dropouts. This was because although both sisters where minors when schools closed and they began working in households, Poonam attainted 18 years of age as on the base date (September 2020), putting her outside the scope of the survey.

Impact on interventions

Policy experts said the lack of comprehensive, reliable data on school dropouts was severely affecting government efforts to design interventions addressing emerging concerns.

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※Scarcity of adequate data, especially during the pandemic, has been a big challenge in multiple ways. Large scale studies on the impact of COVID on the status of education of children are yet to be conducted, hence currently we do not have sufficient data to gauge the impact of pandemic on various child protection issues including child labour, child marriage and child trafficking. But grassroots level data/information and some anecdotal evidences reflect on the increased vulnerability of children,§ said Priti Mahara, Director, Policy, Research and Advocacy at CRY 每 Child Rights and You.

※Having an easily accessible real-time and comprehensive database on various child development

Indicators would have certainly enabled us to measure the exact scale of the disruptions caused by the pandemic and quantify losses incurred, and thereby helping evidence-based planning and interventions to address and perhaps reverse some of the negative impacts of the pandemic on children,§ she added.

The writer is a Kolkata based freelance contributor.