While the life-purloining virus is rising in India, the fiscal immunity of warriors is plummeting with a resultant strain on fund allocations for education in most households – collaterally affecting women’s education. This pandemic has pushed nearly 75 million Indians below the poverty level, especially the migrating labour force, causing some to lose their entire annual income while stifling some to just ₹375 per day.
As a result, funding education for a girl child has declined to the least of the priorities, at the expense of ensuring sufficient medical assistance for her. While health shouldn’t be compromised for education, neither should it be contorted as an excuse to deter the same – which is now conveniently weaponized by the patriarchy in India.
While the new NEP has relaxed the age limits of RTE from 3-18 years, covering the entirety of one’s schooling, adjudication of the private schools still lies in the grey area. Ashish Dhawan, CEO and Founder of Central Square Foundation, calls such an arrangement ‘unspecific‘ for private schools.
As primary and secondary education for girls has managed to secure the purview of public and legislative discourse, adult education for women remains a concerning subject, sinking in the abyss. The average expenditure of getting a college education in India ranges from somewhere between ₹5,240 in rural areas to triple the amount, almost ₹16,308 in urban areas, with a continuing spike in STEM courses (₹72,000 and above approx).
Thus, at this juncture of widespread financial deficiency due to rising unemployment and plaguing pay cuts, women from the weaker sections of society and the disadvantaged segments of the middle classes are understandably struggling to continue their adult education.
A study on deterrents to participation in adult education programs among licensed women nurses in India concluded that common factors are disengagement, lack of quality in available education programs, family constraints, cost of participation, perceived lack of benefit from participation, and work constraints.
In a similar study conducted on deterrents to female participation in web-based higher education programs of public accountancy (Perdue, 1999), the factors identified were: concerns about the quality and relevance of course offerings, concerns about electronically mediated communication, concerns about access to technology-associated resources and concerns about the availability of necessary personal resources – all finally contributing to an escalated number of women drop-outs.
Hence, steps in the dilemma of the State’s role to help sustain the continuing agency of education in women’s lives irrespective of the emergency at hand. Taking advantage of the lack of nuance in NEP 2020, private educational institutions are overlooking the disabling threats faced by its women students.
Involved parent and graphic designer Yogesh Pathare has formed the Rashtriya Sikhsha Palak Sangathan, an organization lobbying for the reduction in fees of the private schools. This organization has mainly aimed to highlight the illegal increase of 15% in fees structure by the school management thus, demanding redemption of 50% in the actual cost, at least for the period of crisis on humanitarian grounds. But such initiatives are in nothing, but their mere infancy as schools continue to refuse the demands and PILs remain in limbo.
The aspect of higher education for women is equally aborted. While the NEP 2020 has recognized how India’s GER in higher education is 26.3% lower than all other developed countries and has solemnly sworn to a mammoth task of raising it to 50%, what it lacks is a concrete plan of action to do the same.
Lack of assertive legislation ensuring adult education for women has reinforced the trend of covid child brides, married off as soon as they complete schooling. On the other hand, female college-goers’ compulsion to unwantedly turn to sex trade to merely sustain their higher education is particularly on the rise amidst the pandemic.
Richa Bera, a second-year Sociology student, broke down in the middle of a class expressing despair at her declining academic performance, “I also have to do a job, just to support my father in paying the college fee. I don’t get the time to study. Never have I performed so badly in school. I feel ashamed.”
Therefore, faced with the challenge of safety of life versus the safety of education, India slays the latter, capitalizing on the pandemic as an opportunity to suppress women’s empowerment by employing education. Systematic loopholes in access to education for disadvantageous women was a regularised problem thus far. Still, with an increasing proportion of female students, from the privileged classes facing this problem, the administrative disparities of State are now screaming for a meaningful reformation – perhaps in need of gratuitous and de-privatized, quality education. Thus, the time shall say what prevails mightier: the pen or the pandemic.
The author is a Kaksha Correspondent as a part of writers’ training program under Kaksha Crisis.