India has long been touted as the world’s next major economic superpower. It has achieved remarkable growth – over 270 million Indians were pulled out of poverty between 2005 and 2015, according to the United Nations Development Programme – have helped make it the world’s fifth-largest economy.
And its youthful population – more than half its citizens are under the age of 25 – meant it was set for further expansion.
However, experts fear that benefits from this demographic dividend are now under threat. India’s draconian Covid lockdowns mean many children have missed out on large chunks of education, many will never return to school and the already huge gap between rich and poor has become even wider.
In March 2020, schools and other education institutions closed their doors and by August 2021 many students still hadn’t returned to their classrooms.
India’s parlous public health system means that the only way to control Covid is to lock down. Some states reopened their schools in the Autumn but many closed again in December or January, when omicron emerged.
In India’s financial capital of Mumbai, primary schools and secondary schools have only been open for three weeks and three months, respectively, since March 2020.
“It is effectively a lost generation. It’s a cliche but that probably is how it is,” says Anjela Taneja, advocacy lead at Oxfam India.
“Whatever last hope we had of making use of the demographic dividend has probably been lost.”
The World Bank has warned that the ongoing school closures will devastate Indian economic growth in the long-term, due to the loss of earnings and skills development, putting current Indian students at a disadvantage in the job market.
By October 2020, school closures had already cost the Indian economy an estimated £6.5 billion, according to the World Bank.
This is also a global problem, a recent report by the World Bank warned this generation of students now risks losing $17 trillion in lifetime earnings, far more than the $10 trillion estimated in 2020.
In east Africa, millions of Ugandan children returned to study in January after the world’s longest Covid-19 school closure.
Some 15 million pupils had not attended school in Uganda since March 2020 when classrooms were closed as the pandemic first swept the world.
Teachers also say the 83 week-long closure has will lead to a “lost generation” for the country.
Stuart Lubwama, headteacher of Entebbe Bright Secondary School on the outskirts of the capital Kampala, says that many teenage boys went out to make money in construction, farming or hustling on the streets. He adds there has been an explosion of teenage pregnancies.
The government recorded nearly 650,000 teenage pregnancies between 2020 and 2021, an astronomical rise for a country of only 45m.
“Whatever last hope we had of making use of the demographic dividend has probably been lost.”
The World Bank has warned that the ongoing school closures will devastate Indian economic growth in the long-term, due to the loss of earnings and skills development, putting current Indian students at a disadvantage in the job market.
By October 2020, school closures had already cost the Indian economy an estimated £6.5 billion, according to the World Bank.
This is also a global problem, a recent report by the World Bank warned this generation of students now risks losing $17 trillion in lifetime earnings, far more than the $10 trillion estimated in 2020.
In east Africa, millions of Ugandan children returned to study in January after the world’s longest Covid-19 school closure.
Some 15 million pupils had not attended school in Uganda since March 2020 when classrooms were closed as the pandemic first swept the world.
Teachers also say the 83 week-long closure has will lead to a “lost generation” for the country.
Stuart Lubwama, headteacher of Entebbe Bright Secondary School on the outskirts of the capital Kampala, says that many teenage boys went out to make money in construction, farming or hustling on the streets. He adds there has been an explosion of teenage pregnancies.
The government recorded nearly 650,000 teenage pregnancies between 2020 and 2021, an astronomical rise for a country of only 45m.
Out of 400 children in Entebbe Bright Secondary School before the school closure, only about 200 have returned so far. “We are losing a generation. They have lost a lot of progress,” says Mr Lubwama.
Whilst in richer countries schools switched to online learning that was not possible in many parts of the world.
“We cannot use remote learning here in Uganda as connectivity is not high,” said Mr Lubwama.
The Indian government also moved learning online but only eight per cent of Indian homes have access to a computer with an internet connection and just a quarter of Indians own a smartphone.
In many families, there is just one smartphone and this is owned by the breadwinner or head of the family, usually the father, who needs the device for their own work.
As a result, only 20 per cent of school age children have been able to regularly access remote learning during the pandemic, according to a survey carried out by the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations, a Delhi-based think tank.
This figure is also skewed towards urban, affluent households in cities like Delhi and Mumbai. It drops to eight per cent of children in rural areas, according to a nationwide survey by over 100 education activists in August 2021.
“We have seen the divide between schooling evolving. We simply don’t have enough schemes providing laptops and tablets to school children or teachers who are educated in how to use these devices,” says Pradyumna Jairam, a researcher at King’s College London and former school teacher in India.