Baishali Mukherjee (Kolkata)

West Bengal’s 92,000 government and 2,000 private schools, 372 colleges and 32 universities will reopen for on-campus classes on November 16. Following chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s declaration to this effect on October 25, an official gazette notification was issued by the state government on October 28 re-starting the massive education system of West Bengal (pop.91 million) after the unprecedented 20 months long Covid pandemic lockdown.

However under the October 28 order, only class IX-XII students are permitted to attend on-campus classes with the education ministry also set to announce the schedule for class X and XII board exams for 2022. Board exams for 2021 were cancelled earlier this year for fear of Covid-19 contagion.

The ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) government’s ultra-cautious restarting of on-campus secondary and higher education classes has received lukewarm welcome. “In the US and Europe, the effect of closure of education institutions has been studied extensively, and they are of the opinion that (prolonged closure of education institutions) has decreased students’ life expectancy and caused enormous economic damage that will take 70 years to set right. We have to remember the closure has been much longer in India and therefore the effect is going to be huge,” Dr. Arjun Dasgupta, one of Kolkata’s leading medical practitioners, told The Hindu (October 28).

Experienced educationists in Kolkata believe that the TMC government’s restriction of on-campus in-class learning to secondary upwards education reflects a confused mindset, if not inverted priorities. Self-evidently, older children are better equipped to self-learn and access online learning. On the other hand, youngest children in pre-primary and primary classes who are too young to learn online, are in danger of forgetting the socialisation skills they learn in early childhood education and the academic fundamentals they learn in primary classes.

According to Dr. Swati Popat Vats, president of the Early Childhood Association of India, India’s prolonged lockdown of schools — the longest of any major country worldwide — has endangered the architecture of the revolutionary 5+3+3+4 K-12 education system mandated by the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 which accords high importance to early childhood care and education (ECCE). “Because of the too prolonged closure of schools, many years of work to impact the value of professionally provided ECCE to children in their most important years has gone down the drain,” Dr. Popat Vats told EducationWorld in July.

In defence of the cautious approach to restarting class I-VIII, state education ministry spokesperson quote the Annual Status of Education Report 2020 Wave 1 of the highly-respected Pratham Education Foundation.
According to the report, West Bengal has the least number of children who dropped out of school in the 2018-20 period. The report says, school dropouts in the state declined from 3.3 percent to 1.5 percent even as the national percentage increased from 4 to 5.5 percent during the pandemic. This is because the West Bengal government distributed textbooks to 99.7 percent of school students as against Uttar Pradesh (79.6 percent), Rajasthan (60.4), Gujarat (95), Andhra Pradesh (84.6) and Maharashtra (80.8 percent). “As a result there was much less learning loss in West Bengal during the pandemic,” says an education ministry official.

However, this defence of the casual attitude of the TMC government towards early childhood and primary education stretches credulity. “It’s absurd to believe that youngest children can self-learn because they’ve been given textbooks, especially first generation learners. The plain truth is that for political populism reasons, the chief minister and TMC government threw Covid protocols to the winds during the month long Durga Puja festival as a result of which Covid infections statewide have risen sharply. This has necessitated government’s extreme caution about reopening schools. But the fact is that primary schools have restarted countrywide and West Bengal is a laggard state.

According to billionaire Azim Premji, chairman of the Azim Premji Foundation, 220 million children have not learnt anything during the pandemic. In the circumstances, the lackadaisical attitude of the TMC government towards re-starting early childhood and primary classes is disgraceful,” says the irate principal of a co-ed day school in Kolkata, who understandably preferred to remain anonymous.

Across the country when state governments have to choose between religious festivities and education continuity, the preference is for pujas. West Bengal is no exception.

Also read: West Bengal: Schools and colleges to reopen on November 16