Teachers In Rural India Fight A Losing Battle To Keep Kids In ‘Class'

In Bihar alone 1.4 crore students are without digital devices. To make sure education reaches all, teachers are trying everything from evening classes to phone recharges

- Manash.Gohain

With lockdowns shutting schools across the country, students have struggled to access remote learning. In some places, they wait for their parents to return from work so that they can access lessons sent by the teacher on WhatsApp. Some land up at neighbors’ homes asking to use their smartphones. Others watch non-interactive recorded lessons on TV. But the struggle isn’t theirs alone.

Teachers across rural India spoke about how they were attempting to ensure their students didn’t fall behind with measures that range from open-air classes to recharging phones.

Biswajeet Bodo, headteacher of Jugal High School in Bamunpukhuru village in Assam’s Tezpur district, and his colleagues have been conducting classes in open spaces or in Nam Ghars, places of congregational worship, since only around 150 of the 480 students in the school have access to smartphones.

“During the first wave of Covid, we picked five venues in five villages around the school, called the students of that particular area and taught them in the open. But that had to stop as the number of cases was very high in the second wave,” Bodo said. “Then we made arrangements with families that have mobile phones to lend them for 90 minutes to those who don’t have devices,” he said.