Girls and the 'digital divide'

Column in Mathrubhumi

(Translated in Malayalam)

 

In an earlier column, I described a family that lives on the pavement near my house in Mumbai.  The young girl, who became a mother at the age of 16, has a phone and is constantly watching something on it, or speaking to someone.  But it is unlikely that she is accessing any form of learning through that phone.  She is amongst millions of girls in India who have barely stepped into a school.

 

One of the long-term impact of this pandemic, for which there appears to be no end in sight, will be on literacy, particularly that of girls.

 

In recent years, there have been many centrally-sponsored programmes focussing on educating girls.  States like Kerala or Himachal Pradesh have invested generously in literacy programmes leading to positive results.

 

Yet, unfortunately, the Covid-19 pandemic is going to be a serious setback to all these efforts.

 

The sad reality is that despite investment and targetted programmes, millions of girls never enter a classroom.  Studies have shown that 30 per cent of girls from poor households have never attended school.

 

Although at the primary level, school enrolment has steadily increased, and on paper at least it is over 90 per cent, any disruption, such as the pandemic, can result in dropouts.  For poor families, the midday meal scheme was a very big attraction.  But now, with the closure of schools, midday meals have stopped thereby further diminishing chances of girls learning anything.

 

According to some recent studies, an estimated 20 per cent of girls will not be back in school as and when the lockdown lifts. The reasons for this could be many but mostly because families are impoverished, and also displaced from the places where they lived and worked, and where their children could go to a school.

 

Now that the national lockdown has been extended until August 31, and schools are not going to open until later, there is another factor that will impact girls, especially those from deprived backgrounds.

 

The "digital divide", where a large population cannot access the Internet or benefit from the spread of connectivity through mobiles, is also a gender divide.  Children all over India are expected to continue learning through online classes. But for that you need access.  And many poor families do not have smart phones or access to Internet.

 

Recognising this, some states have made special efforts to reach the children of the underprivileged by sending out teachers with smartphones or internet-ready devices, which can be used to teach groups of children.  But such a policy is not being followed uniformly across India.

 

As a result, girls will be the first to suffer as given the gender divide, families will make an effort to ensure that boys access online classes and will not necessarily make the same effort for girls.  A study in the last two years of children in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana found that 80 per cent of the girls surveyed had never accessed the Internet and 62 per cent had never used a computer.

 

If that is the reality even in two southern states, one can just imagine the situation in the northern states that are behind in most social development indicators. So the longer the pandemic continues, and with it the closure of schools, the larger will be the number of girls in India who will be missing out on education.

 

In the long-term, female literacy, and the education of girls is central to bringing about a real change in our society.  We cannot even speak of equality between men and women if one out of every two girls between the ages of 5 and 9 is illiterate in India today.