For children from these communities, schools provide safety and a routine. They ensure that children are not pushed into labour. Attending school is also a way for girls to avoid early marriage and ensure mobility and freedom. Additionally, the provision of midday meals by schools serves as a crucial support system in combating child hunger.

During the pandemic, 84 percent households reported income loss, which in turn added to the challenges of attending school. Reports indicate that as schools shut down, many children, particularly boys, developed an alcoholism problem and indulged in substance abuse. Constantly living under conditions of stress and anxiety also curbed their desire to pursue education and other goals.

Post-pandemic education

After the pandemic ended, there was a stark decline in education quality across the country. An assessment of students from grades 2–6 across five states revealed that, when compared to the previous year, 92 percent and 82 percent children across all grades lost at least one specific language and mathematical ability, respectively. The situation was worse for grade 10 students, only 13 percent of whom scored more than 50 percent in mathematics. In all these assessment tests, the performance of children in public schools and those belonging to marginalised communities was the lowest.

The School Children’s Online and Offline Learning (SCHOOL) survey conducted in August 2022 across 16 states and union territories in the country focused on relatively deprived villages and bastis (slums), where children generally attend government schools. It found that among children in grade 3—an age where they should be able to read fluently in their mother tongue—only 25 percent could read more than a few words. This figure is worse for Dalit and Adivasi children.

It is estimated that only 27.5 percent students had access to digital devices when schools switched to digital mediums. Among those who were part of digital classes, only 15.8 percent found the online learning experience to be good. Teachers too were unprepared for virtual classroom interactions. Poor internet connections and lack of access to digital devices excluded marginalised students from online education.

Why digitisation is not the solution

The education space in the last two years in India is marked by two distinct trends: greater centralisation in classroom methods and learning through digitisation, and neglection of the inextricable link between equity and quality of education in attempts to bridge learning losses.

To make up for the losses incurred during the pandemic, governments at both the central and state levels drew up plans to improve foundational learning through bridge courses, remedial centres, new textbooks and work sheets, teacher trainings, and so on. Digitisation cut across as the main feature through all these initiatives.

For example, Chandigarh initiated Project Phoenix, which includes a continuous assessment of each child’s learning. The assessments are conducted on a monthly basis in order to identify children’s learning gaps. The Andhra Pradesh government signed an MoU with BJYU’s to ‘provide learning opportunities’ through digital technology. In Gujarat, ‘centralised summative and formative examinations’ have been introduced for grades 3 to 12. This involves centralised data entry for all 4.3 million students for all the subjects, and approximately 500 million unique data entries are compiled and analysed for each examination. In Puducherry, all schools with pre-primary sections have been provided with a Bluetooth device that possesses loudspeaker, voice recording, and USB capabilities.

In addition to capturing student data, apps and software have been developed to digitise the process of education governance. This includes time-barred bills, resignation and premature retirement, permission for higher education, NOC for recognition of schools with CBSE/ICSE, recognition and registration of schools, issuance of second copy of certificate, verification of documents, and migration certificates. According to the state governments, this has expedited the disposal of various types of applications and teacher grievances. 

Instead of privileging the capacities of teachers and the natural curiosity of students, digitisation has reduced the teacher to a mere conduit of information.

But this drive for digitisation has caused a distinct transformation in the role of teachers. At a time when fostering open dialogues with students, comprehending their unique challenges, and empowering them to learn at their individual rhythms should be prioritised, there is an increasingly prominent focus on e-learning. This shift has led to the standardisation of pedagogical content—dictating not only what must be taught, but also the speed at which it should be delivered and how student progress should be evaluated. This undermines and bypasses the role of engagement and dialogue, removing personal contact between the student and the teacher. Assessing children within such rigid parameters has placed undue pressure on teachers to simply check predetermined boxes. It has diverted them from relying on their inherent strengths and professional expertise. Instead of privileging the capacities of teachers and the natural curiosity of students, digitisation has reduced the teacher to a mere conduit of information.

This centralised mechanism monitors both student and teacher performance, ultimately neglecting cultural differences, institutional experiences, social and economic backgrounds, as well as the significant challenges of disparity and inequality within the education system. What cannot be measured cannot be true, and so all the debates and discussions on what constitutes education and issues of pedagogy based on inclusiveness and equity have become irrelevant.

Moreover, this system is prone to errors that can lead to significant setbacks for students. Mistakes in uploading student information, document mismatches, and inconsistencies in the spelling of a student’s name across various records can result in the denial of scholarships, admissions, certificates, examination hall tickets, and other such critical aspects. The absence of a direct interface with individuals to voice concerns and rectify these issues further compounds the problem.

Equity and quality of education

Without addressing the issues of inequity that plague the education sector, it is unlikely that any attempts to improve the quality of education will actually work.

A stratified education system affects the quality of education by hindering access for every student.

The nature of India’s education system and the manner in which public schools operate are a reflection of its social inequities and hierarchies. While a small number of public schools are well endowed (as in the case of Kendriya Vidyalayas or Navodaya schools), there are thousands of public schools that struggle financially. The inadequate infrastructure and resources of public schools in small towns and villages reinforces inequalities and discrimination.

A stratified education system affects the quality of education by hindering access for every student. This challenge makes it even harder for the most marginalised to fully participate in school; enjoy the educational journey with proper teacher guidance, classroom resources, and necessary infrastructure; and successfully complete their secondary education. Efforts to enhance education quality, such as remedial teaching and bridge courses, often seem to lack genuine commitment, resulting in an overall failure of the education system to fulfil its purpose.

It is only when the education system is propelled to act based on the principle of equity that the capabilities of every child can be developed. It is this commitment to equitable standards that will help overcome existing challenges of discrimination due to gender, caste, ethnic origin, family background, and socio-economic circumstances.

Only a rights-based approach focused on the principle of equality and universality can enable children to have equal opportunities. This approach should include measures such as:

• Designating an authority to track and ensure children attend school.
• Providing children with the resources required to pursue their education.
• Providing out-of-school children the appropriate support to catch up to their peers.  

It is in recognising the integral link between equity and quality of education that real solutions emerge. Greater investments would flow, students would not be pushed out of schools for want of learning, and special arrangements would be made to retain children in schools and enjoy the process of education.

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Know more

• Read this to learn more about the COVID-19 pandemic impact education in India.
• Read this to learn more about the New Education Policy 2020.

Organisations working in Assam confirm the growing distress on the ground. Hardeep Singh Bambrah, senior leader at Piramal Swasthya Management and Research Institute (PSMRI), which works with the National Health Mission (NHM) in Assam, says communities are reporting rising insecurity and anxiety. Dr Mintu Moni Sarma and Dr Nilesh Mohite, psychiatrists who work with the Action Northeast Trust (ANT), say cases of depression and anxiety have increased significantly. Dr Mintu, who works in lower Assam, says, “Before the pandemic, we attended to more cases of psychosis, such as schizophrenia, and fewer common mental disorders, such as anxiety. This has changed and now we are seeing much higher numbers of common mental disorders.”

A 2020 survey conducted by Assam Police, with help from the Department of Psychiatry, Gauhati Medical College Hospital (GMCH), found that 46 percent of callers suffered from anxiety, 14 percent from depressive symptoms, and 8.3 percent from depressive disorders. About 5.4 percent of them had suicidal thoughts. ANT has also been seeing a sudden increase in the incidence of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders (OCD) at their camps, with some patients washing their hands repeatedly, sometimes until their skin starts peeling.

Experts point out that this is unprecedented in a state with otherwise relatively stable indicators for mental health. Dr Mintu points out that the region is familiar with conflict and violence. “I have lived here through disturbances and observed that people have developed a kind of resilience. It may have something to do with the traditional external support they have in their communities. But COVID-19, with the enforced isolation, has been new for the community.”

The current spate of mental illnesses in rural communities has been set off by the need for isolation and the uncertainties thrown up by the pandemic, including loss of livelihoods and a long period of economic distress.

To deal with this, the Assam government launched Monon, a telepsychology helpline in collaboration with PSMRI’s 104 service and the Gauhati Medical College Mental Health Department, to provide mental health support to COVID-19 patients across the state. According to Hardeep, between June and December 2022, volunteers under Monon proactively reached out to 22,618 COVID-19 patients in quarantine or in isolation centres. Volunteers operating the helpline discovered that most beneficiaries had mental health symptoms due to psychosocial factors rather than the disease itself. These included unemployment, financial insecurity, and stigma.

Multiple triggers for deteriorating mental health

Of the 3,262 suicide cases recorded by the NCRB in 2021, 659—or 20 percent—involved daily wage labourers. Dr Nilesh, who caters to the marginalised population in the state, says the number went up significantly when migrant labourers were compelled to return from urban centres and other states after the lockdown was announced on March 25, 2020. Approximately 3.9 lakh migrants returned to Assam. Estimates show that only half the interstate migrants from Northeast India have returned to work.

Hardeep says he has heard of loss of livelihood among many, and the floods in June this year have made matters worse. “We have been hearing many heart-rending stories on economic crises from faith-based leaders, panchayat members, and volunteers. There is one that sums up the situation on the ground. An autorickshaw driver had to sell off his vehicle during the pandemic. Now he does not have the money to buy it back,” he says.

A study published in the Asia Pacific Journal of Public Health has registered a shift in the age group suffering from depression, anxiety, or stress. During the 2016 NMHS, the prevalence of mental disorders was higher in the 40–49 age category, but in 2020 it was higher for those between 26 and 35 years of age. Of the suicides, 2,351 were male and 911 were female. This could indicate that young male earners are affected more. As many migrants have not returned to earlier jobs, there is also more competition in the local ecosystem.

However, Dr Nilesh points out, food security is not an issue in the region as most people own land and ponds. They rely on rice or fish. Most locals are self-employed and many of the returned migrants are pulling back into agriculture and fishery. Hardeep says many are seeking loans and microfinancing options to start something of their own.

During the lockdown, the incidence of domestic violence increased, setting back the mental health of women.

Organisations have also noted other triggers brought on by COVID-19. In some cases, drug addiction has added a layer of complexity. “Some locals migrate to Dubai or UAE and are used to earning well. When they returned due to the pandemic, they went into depression and got into drugs. We saw such patients before travel restrictions were lifted,” said Dr Nilesh. Suicide has also been common among addicts because the state government’s crackdown on drugs has affected supply, he added. During the lockdown, the incidence of domestic violence also increased, setting back the mental health of women. To make it worse, this demographic is not prompt about seeking help. “Women were depressed for months together and came to our campus only when they became non-functional,” Dr Mintu says.

Increasing awareness and improving last-mile infrastructure

Awareness about mental illnesses has improved in Assam over the years, although it is still not at the level health providers would like it to be.

“When I started the camp 19 years ago, I would see one or two patients occasionally. Now, attendance is very good. There is less stigma around it. If someone is suicidal or in depression for weeks, they know it is a good idea to go to a doctor,” says Dr Mintu. However, people find it easier to identify severe mental disorders and tend to get help only in late stages of illness. Otherwise, they presume they are ‘stressed out’ or ‘tense’ and ignore symptoms.

The state does not have adequate number of trained resources who can help patients identify indicators and markers of mental disease. PSMRI’s 104 service offers mental health counselling as one of its four services, but Hardeep believes awareness about such provisions needs to grow. According to him, if you go to a person in a village and ask them if they are aware that the 104 helpline service provides mental health counselling, most will tell you that they do not know about it. So, there is a lot of work that the government can do in terms of a) increasing awareness around these services, and b) developing infrastructure and building capacities at the last mile.

Organisations operating in remote areas also say that out-of-pocket expenditure for healthcare is high here, partly because of the terrain. “To get to some villages, you change boats twice or four times. In other places, it is hilly terrain,” says Hardeep. Additionally, as things return to normal, people are wary of spending money on transportation or travelling long distances to avail medical services because financially they are worse off than before. “They can’t afford bus or auto fare to go the distance to a private practitioner, district hospital, or block hospital. They would rather have the services rendered at their village doorstep. And we’re seeing this in the form of increased demand for our mobile medical units.”

Not enough trained personnel

The 2016 NMHS showed Assam at lower risk of mental health concern than other states. However, even then, availability of mental healthcare was lower here than in other states. It is among the states with a high deficit of psychiatrists.

Government-run health and wellness centres under Ayushman Bharat have yet to build adequate capacity to take on mental healthcare.

The District Mental Health Programme (DMHP) has helped monitor the number of suicides and report them, but it is underutilised for treatment. Dr Mintu says, “We had thought, as a small nonprofit, we would see a decrease in patient load because of the free consultation and medicines the DMHP provides. But this has not happened. Locals are not confident the psychiatrist will be available when they get to the clinic after travelling far. They’re also not sure they will continue getting the medicines or counselling they need. After all, it is not only about remission of symptoms.” The government-run health and wellness centres under Ayushman Bharat tend to focus on non-communicable illnesses, such as hypertension and diabetes, and maternal and child health. They have yet to build adequate capacity to take on mental healthcare.

Capacity building

Hardeep says mental health needs to be prioritised in the wake of the pandemic despite the challenges—lack of sufficient human resources and existing healthcare personnel who do not have the training needed for mental illnesses. He also believes there is need for contextualised solutions. “The state is so diverse that a one-shoe-fits-all policy would not work here. Each district, block, and village is different. Every tribal community has its own set of beliefs and customs.” It is key to sensitise resources to the culture of the community for a mental health programme to be effective.

Each project will need to collaborate with local and other stakeholders. Dr Mintu says that informal practitioners and faith healers, for instance, often refer patients to the psychiatrists when they realise they need extensive help. “We have, in fact, held some workshops with informal practitioners as they can be important resources.”

Fortunately, COVID-19 has given the cloud of mental health in Assam a silver lining. Health workers have been compelled to adopt and adapt to technology. This opens up an opportunity for Assam to use a combination of telepsychiatry and mobile medical units to attend to patients. Telemental health can help bridge the widening gap between the mental health epidemic and the lack of infrastructure and resources to deal with it.

Through my work with the citizen journalism platform CGNet Swara during the COVID-19 lockdown in India in 2020, I had a ringside view of what can go wrong when organisations undertake relief efforts while being unprepared to do so. In this article, I highlight how our inexperience with crisis response led to certain vulnerable communities being negatively affected, and draw out lessons for other social sector leaders or organisations that might need to undertake disaster response.

On March 24, 2020, India announced a nationwide lockdown to contain the spread of the coronavirus. Originally intended for three weeks, the lockdown was regularly extended until June 2020. During this time, many migrant labourers were stranded without food or money and millions had to walk thousands of miles to return home.

For more than 10 years, villagers in Central India had called or messaged the CGNet Swara helpline to report on failures in the government machinery to provide clean water, electricity, and infrastructure or issues with government payments such as pension and NREGA wages. And during the first seven weeks of the lockdown, our helpline number was overwhelmed with 401 distress calls from those who did not have money to buy basic necessities or needed help reaching home. Since our internal team was unable to adequately address each grievance, we appealed to volunteers we had worked with in the past. Eleven people responded to this call, and so, amid the chaos triggered by the lockdown, I found myself managing a team of digital volunteers who were determined to act in this crisis situation.

My role consisted of monitoring their efforts in real time, during which I uncovered several troubling issues such as police threats to distress callers requesting food and online harassment of women volunteers. Here are five things we failed to do, along with what we could have done differently, to minimise the risk to vulnerable communities.

1. Balance privacy and transparency

Since 2010, CGNet Swara has published more than 20,000 audio stories from nearly 6,500 callers. As a policy, anonymity is only allowed if our editors are convinced that there is personal risk to the caller. However, during the lockdown, there were many first-time callers who were unaware of this provision and were not informed of the risks involved with publicly reporting their grievance. For instance, one distress caller, who challenged the government’s claim that everyone was receiving enough food, reported being threatened by the police.

“If someone stands in front of you with a lathi (a heavy stick used by the police as a weapon), you will obviously get scared,” said Pradeep,* a distress caller from Rewa district in Madhya Pradesh. “After that we said we don’t want any help [from CGNet]; it is okay if we die hungry.”

Pradeep’s case is hardly unique. According to a study on the Stranded Workers Action Network, which helped more than 36,000 labourers survive the lockdown during the first COVID-19 wave in India, “Workers who were enterprising enough to seek help through various means were threatened or beaten.”

It was only in hindsight that we realised how the context of the crisis resulted in heightened scrutiny of our work by powerful actors seeking to control the narrative. At the very least, we should have walked callers through the risks of participation and given them the option of anonymity if they desired.

2. Re-examine incentive structures

We also realised that metrics decided upon with funders don’t always work in the context of a crisis. As part of its grant agreements, CGNet would measure impact on the basis of the number of grievance reports it had been able to ‘resolve’. The limitations of this approach were on display when I interviewed Ranju,* a distress caller from Bihar who was stranded in Noida at the time. He was unhappy with us despite receiving a supplement of rice—a clear reflection of our impact.

“For how many days can we eat 5 kg of rice?” asked Ranju. “If you want to help, help properly.”  

I regularly encountered similar stories during my interviews with distress callers, who asked me for a second round of food. Our response to such requests would be to ask the caller to record another story for the additional assistance required. When we responded to it, this would generate a second impact report—an approach that helped us exceed funder expectations by showing more than three times the impact compared to the previous quarter.

While this may appear to be a success, utilising this metric created a distorted incentive structure and was a hindrance to fostering ongoing relations between volunteers, staff, and distress callers. Rather than create a support system that helped communities through the duration of the crisis, it incentivised one-time assistance with the aim of measuring impact.

We saw this play out in the context of our action team, whose responsibility it is to follow up on grievances till they convert into an impact report. We found that some distress callers would incorrectly report their issue as ‘resolved’ just to get a break from these daily phone calls.

“They (action team) told me to record this so I said that we’ve reached home,” recounted Upendra* from Kondagaon district in Chhattisgarh who was working in Andhra Pradesh before the lockdown. “But the problem hasn’t been solved.”

Although we recorded 123 impact reports in seven weeks, the number may have been overestimated if others, like Upendra, reported an impact just to appease the action team.

We learnt that providing an option to withdraw requests for assistance or be placed on a do-not-disturb list can better protect the integrity of the impact database and privacy of community members.

3. Maintain impartiality

Humanitarian interventions strive to maintain the principle of impartiality—that similar groups be treated similarly. We breached this principle when we used multiple, inconsistent methods to verify distress calls—from the ‘desperation’ in their voice to how often they call to personally checking in on the caller through someone living in the area.

This resulted in a lottery for distress callers, where the lucky few enjoyed lax verification while others were subjected to stringent requirements. Creating streamlined procedures to assist beneficiaries is important during a crisis as it reduces arbitrariness.

Nearly as important is how we communicate these procedures to beneficiaries. As part of our technical system, call recordings of less than 30 seconds are automatically discarded on the grounds that valid stories take longer to narrate. This policy made sense for our original work of resolving long-standing community issues such as road repair and provision of clean water. In a crisis, it discriminated against distress callers who were unaware of this 30-second rule and as a result found their stories discarded without any due process. Reassessing policies and technical systems is particularly important during a crisis where there may be many first-time beneficiaries who are unfamiliar with a given service.

4. Formulate standard operating procedures

In the aftermath of disasters, we are increasingly seeing concerned citizens mobilise and assist with relief efforts. In such situations, organisations need standard operating procedures (SOPs) to protect the volunteers and beneficiaries they work with from unintended harm.

One of the Adivasi women I interviewed from Central India had travelled to the local government office under the scorching summer sun with her two children because one of our volunteers had assured her that she would get food. She had to return empty-handed.

Upon enquiring further, I found that the volunteer had registered her appeal for food on the CM Helpline, a government portal in Madhya Pradesh. When he was notified that her case was resolved, he communicated the same to her but failed to follow up and ensure the benefit was indeed delivered. In another case, volunteers gave Kashiram,* a distress caller from Madhya Pradesh, the numbers of aid organisations that would give him food, without realising that he did not have enough money to call them.

“They (volunteers) said to call this number, that number, but I don’t have any balance (mobile money),” reported Kashiram. “I can’t even go to the market to put in balance (due to the lockdown).” To mitigate instances like this, it is important for organisations to independently follow up on the work done by volunteers and remediate any harm done by them to vulnerable communities.

Meanwhile, two out of six women volunteers I interviewed faced online harassment from ‘creeps’ who initially promised support to distress callers but later asked for volunteers’ photos and stalked them across platforms.

“I tried to convince him that our relationship is professional…But he keeps texting me on WhatsApp, on SMS. He wouldn’t stop calling me,” said Sayani,* a CGNet volunteer. “Somehow, he managed to get my email ID and then he emailed me too. I don’t know from where he got my email ID, but he got my email ID.”

While we were able to intervene in both cases retroactively, the damage had been done. Such incidents may be inevitable if digital volunteering programmes are rolled out at a larger scale, making it important for organisations to put in place a protocol to proactively deal with harassment.

5. Bridge the digital divide

Disaster management responses tend to suffer from a ‘signal’ problem where better-off communities are more likely to be able to benefit from an intervention, as compared to those who lack access to certain resources.

We saw this during the lockdowns in 2020 and 2021 with many relief efforts requiring online registration or a Twitter account to broadcast appeals for oxygen or food. While 60 percent of the distress callers we interviewed had a smartphone, nearly all the women callers only used feature phones that could not connect to the internet. To prevent the exclusion of those too poor to afford a smartphone or too remote to access the internet, we had a simple phone number that people could call to report their problem. We then connected them to internet-savvy team members who undertook online registration or tweeted on their behalf to help them avail the relief measures available on the internet.

While we saw the hope this approach gave people, it is both challenging and important to design crisis interventions that account for issues of tech illiteracy and poverty. Even with the best of efforts, our technology excluded those without cellular connectivity or enough mobile balance to give a missed call to our helpline number.

Beyond these five areas, perhaps the biggest takeaway for organisations entering disaster management is to have real-time monitoring of their relief efforts. This can help design privacy policies that are reflective of the new crisis context, revised impact metrics for funders, new verification procedures for beneficiaries, standardised operating procedures for volunteers, and devising interventions that can even reach last-mile communities that are not technologically adept.

*Only first names have been used to protect the privacy of callers.

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Know more

• Read CGNet Swara’s entire report on how social organisations can better deal with a crisis affecting the communities they work with.
• Learn more about some of the potential failures that can happen in emergency relief.

Do more

• Give a missed call or WhatsApp +91 8050068000 to report longstanding community issues that are in need of resolution.
• Volunteer to help resolve grievances that are being reported by villagers on CGNet Swara’s helpline number.
• Connect with Shubhranshu Choudhary at shu@cgnet.in or Devansh Mehta @TheDevanshMehta to learn more about and support their work.

Simply by virtue of their gender, women were also disproportionately affected by the pandemic. To learn more about how COVID-19 changed the lives of women in Gujarat, we spoke with a group of women who are part of the Working Group for Women for Land Ownership (WGWLO)—a network of more than 40 organisations across the state of Gujarat that work with women on the issue of land rights. Drawing on their experiences over the last two years, they talked about the low interest in working on MNREGA schemes, the change in livelihood patterns, and how hard times during the pandemic have made their communities more frugal and watchful.

Looking at health beyond COVID-19

While much of the conversation around health in other states was around camps for COVID-19 testing and quarantine centres, in North Gujarat, the camps threw up other diseases that people were suffering from. Surajben is from Radhanpur block, Patan district, and works largely with women from pastoralist communities. “Just three months ago there was a health camp at a local primary health centre (PHC) in one of the villages I was at. There we saw people suffering from blood pressure and diabetes, and in some cases tuberculosis—illnesses that we hadn’t seen before,” she says.

She adds that these diseases might have been present earlier too, but no one was testing for them. Before the pandemic the ASHA worker’s mandate was to focus on maternal and child health, and during the pandemic on COVID-19 testing and enforcing quarantine.

“But when the government did their annual camp, so many people had high blood pressure, because of stress and tension in the house brought on by corona and the economic losses they suffered because of it. Even pregnant women’s reports showed diabetes. So, health has definitely been affected because they couldn’t go anywhere because of the lockdown, had no work and no income.  All these health problems have happened because of that,” she says. Surajben adds that the village now has a health and wellness centre and a community health officer, who gives people the medicines for blood pressure and diabetes at the right time. 

The experience of the pandemic, combined with these diseases, has led to an increased focus on health, which has extended to agricultural practices too. “Earlier no one was ready to do organic farming as the yield was lower; they preferred using urea, DAP, and other chemical fertilisers to increase productivity. But, after corona, the women are saying that they want to use only deshi (local) fertiliser, because they think the chemical fertilisers have brought diseases like corona and cancer. Health has become important, and they want to use natural and organic inputs for farming. This has been a massive change that we have been seeing over the past few seasons,” says Gavuben, who works in the Saurashtra region of South-East Gujarat.

Livelihood patterns have changed

As with everywhere else in the country, employment and labour came to a grinding halt in Gujarat. Surajben talks about how all work had stopped because of COVID-19. “People who were labourers had no source of income any more. Several months into the pandemic, work started again, but there wasn’t as much work as before.” 

To support families through the crisis, the WGWLO women distributed seeds and rations during the agricultural season. “The villagers said that these dry grains (rice, wheat, lentils) would see them through the next three–four months, because they had no way of earning an income during this time. Some of the women who were better off asked us to give these kits to those who needed them more, especially the landless labourers who had lost their daily wages,” says Gavuben.

People were scared to move back to the city because they were afraid that they’d contract the virus there.

As things started opening up, the nature of work also changed. People were scared to move back to the city because they were afraid that they’d contract the virus there. The perception was that rural India was safer than big, congested cities from where there were reports of constantly rising cases and pictures of death and devastation, especially during the second wave in 2021.

During this time, WGWLO also helped upskill some of the women they worked with. Gavuben says that they encouraged women who had health problems to consider alternative income options. Prior to the pandemic, many of these women would go to work outside their villages and engage in hard labour, often in mines or at construction sites. As a result, several of them had breathing issues and heart problems.

“We told them to stay at home instead and make soap, agarbatti, or khakhra. Since they didn’t have the skills, we trained them. Those who grew fruit—tomatoes, lemons, chikoos—at home received training in making jams, juices, jellies, and sauces from the government through SBI centres. These options are far less labour intensive than construction and farming. The women are therefore healthier and also able to earn more money from these activities,” she says.

Megha Sheth, who leads WGWLO’s communications work, also highlights how fear of the virus in cities is keeping women back in the villages even today. “People are scared. They think that if they have to go to a city like Ahmedabad and work in someone’s kitchen, they might get COVID-19 there. They want to stay in their villages because they think it’s safer; there is less prevalence of the virus here. So we are seeing more interest in these kinds of activities.”

A change in life as we know it

There has also been a change in the way people eat, live, and celebrate festivals and family functions. Many of the women spoke about how they became thrifty in every aspect of their lives. Gavuben says, “Initially, because the shops were shut, we could not go out to buy vegetables and spices. So, we reverted to old and simple recipes. We would take cornflour, put salt and chilli powder, and make kadhi. We would make spicy rotis and eat it with this kadhi. We became very frugal and made sure we didn’t incur any ‘useless’ expenses. Even those who lived very well earlier with all the facilities have scaled back.”

Weddings have been scaled down too. “Earlier we used to have music bands and a DJ for weddings in our area. The celebrations would go on all day, and a lot of people would be invited. We would serve at least four–five items for the wedding lunch. All of this has changed—fewer people are called, they go home by noon, and less food is served,” says Gavuben. 

Jashiben, who lives and works in Bavla, an industrial area on the outskirts of the state capital of Ahmedabad, talks about how people stopped going to each other’s homes even for funerals. “There was a case of a woman who died and was carried to the crematorium in a tractor. No one went to her funeral,” she says.

People have also started saving more. COVID-19 and the complete breakdown in livelihoods and loss of wages and income has made people more cautious about spending. “People have started to understand that it is important to have some savings. In case of emergencies, we should have enough to survive,” explains Gavuben. 

Even the behaviour of men and young people—who would otherwise spend their days roaming around the village or drinking and smoking—has changed. “They fear that if COVID-19 comes again and things shut for two–three months, they won’t have money for their food and daily needs. So whatever little money they’re earning right now, they’re trying to save it in case it is needed at any time,” says Gavuben. People are also looking to sell their land. “Wherever I go, they keep telling me that we want to sell our land, let us know if you know anyone. They are all in debt,” she adds.

Despite income deprivation, there is no uptake of NREGA

According to Jashiben, post the pandemic, farmers are leaving their fields and trying to find jobs in factories instead. Ahmedabad, where she lives, is one of the most industralised districts in the state, and so farming has never been very lucrative here. “Farming alone does not support the family as agricultural lands have been divided over time and there is not enough left with each family. They thus have to work outside.”

Since there is an industrial unit run by the Gujarat Industrial Development Corporation (GIDC) next door, people prefer to look for jobs there. Boys in these surrounding villages are educated only till class 10 (a prerequisite for many government jobs), and they find jobs at GIDC. Girls are allowed to study only in the schools in their villages, after which they are married off between the ages of 14 and 16.

People in this region are also unwilling to take on work under the government’s MGNREGA programme. “We don’t do mitti ka kaam; it is very hard labour. We prefer to work at GIDC, cleaning floors, and so on, but not NREGA work,” says Jashiben. 

The lack of interest in working on NREGA, the country’s rural employment guarantee scheme, cuts across the state.

The lack of interest in working on NREGA, the country’s rural employment guarantee scheme, cuts across the state. There used to be a fair amount of NREGA work in the Saurashtra region, but now the amount of work available has reduced. “Earlier workers would get a full day’s work. Now the contractors only give work between 8 am and 12 pm because of corona. Also, the wages have stayed unchanged over the last few years,” adds Gavuben.

According to Leelaben, who works in Mahisagar district with the tribal communities of eastern Gujarat, the wages from NREGA are not enough. “We got some NREGA work to dig a lake, but it had to stop within a month because of rains. It was very hot outside and we had to walk a lot to throw the mud away. So, we could not get much done. We weren’t paid the mandated INR 200 per day; instead we were paid depending on the size of the hole we dug. So, we’d only get INR 700–800 per week. And this work too only lasted a month,” she says. Surajben reinforces the point. “We do have NREGA work happening, but the remuneration is so little that it is not enough to run a house,” she says.

The fear that COVID-19 will be back runs deep in the women’s minds. They are all keen to make sure that they have good health along with livelihood opportunities that will tide them through difficult times in the future.

Gavuben is a land paralegal worker with the Samarthan Mahila Vikas Sangthan; Jashiben is part of the Bavla Mahila Vikas Sangthan; Leelaben is a land paralegal worker at Sarathi; and Surajben works with MARAG.

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Know more

• Read about how NREGA fared during the lockdown.
• Learn how credit cooperatives can promote worker well-being during crises.
• Understand the link between women’s land ownership and climate resilience.

Keeping girls in school

In Jharkhand, prior to the pandemic, adolescent girls didn’t attend school for a host of reasons, including migration to cities, child marriage, working to supplement family incomes, and household chores. In districts such as Pakur—one of the 117 aspirational districts in India—families migrated en masse seasonally. Adivasi communities would marry their girls early because of an economic incentive—they would receive a bride price from the boy’s family. Many girls were also responsible for taking care of their siblings. All of this meant that sending the girls to school was not a priority for the families.

Before the pandemic, Aangan Trust, an organisation focused on protecting children and adolescent girls, spent a few years working with families and school authorities in Jharkhand to ensure that more girls went to school. They trained 2,000 women volunteers in Pakur to understand the risks to girls’ safety, identify families where girls would be facing these risks, and then take action at the family and community level. “We wanted to see what we could do to ensure that girls were not just enrolled in school, but also attending it regularly. Over two years we saw an increase in attendance—from around five days a month to 15 days or more every month. Moreover, our volunteers helped girls get linked to schemes such as Sukanya Samriddhi (a savings scheme) and Tejaswini (a vocational training scheme). So there was an incentive for families to send their girls to school,” says Chaitali Sheth, COO of Aangan Trust.

When the pandemic hit, schools shut and girls no longer had access to the physical, intellectual, and emotional infrastructure they provide. Nonprofits working in Jharkhand point out that all the work they had done at the grassroots to enrol girls in school—negotiating with and convincing families as well as working with school authorities to make sure that they influenced families to enrol their girls—came to nought. All the gains that had been made prior to the pandemic were lost.

“Most families are facing extreme financial vulnerability. The situation has become so bad that while one parent was working earlier, we now find that both have to work to make ends meet. Having girls at home to take care of siblings and chores allows both parents to go out to work, so they are reluctant to send their girls back to school”, explains Sudeshna Basu, programme head at Aangan. 

Having lost out on two years of learning, adolescent girls themselves are reluctant to go back to school as they feel ill-equipped to cope. Moreover, the reopening of schools in October 2021 coincided with the examination period, and most girls didn’t want to go back and take exams.

“What has changed from 2020 is that we need to keep a really close watch to make sure girls are resuming their education. Secondly, we have to invest resources to help those who have fallen behind. This is really important, because even if they come back to school, they’ll fail in class 8/9/10 and drop out. So helping them cope after they come back to school is critical and we all should be looking at what we can do,” adds Sudeshna.

The state government recognises that girls are not coming back to school. “They’ve been running a few back-to-school programmes, for instance, the ‘100 days reading’ campaign. But these are focused on first to fifth standard and don’t help because it’s the older girls who are dropping out”, says Chaitali.

Sending girls back to school is not just about learning, but also about safety. When a girl makes it to school, even if it’s 10–15 days a month, she is accounted for. “To be honest, at Aangan we are not focused on whether she’s learning or not,” says Chaitali. “She may not be, but she’s in a safe space. And that’s why school is so important. At least she’s not married and pregnant at 15, trafficked, or working in a brick kiln. So, in many ways, prevention from harm is a critical aspect of sending girls to school.”

Mental health surfaced as a big concern for adolescent girls

The long days of fear and a sense of foreboding among young people translated into stress, anxiety, and depression. A quantitative survey undertaken during the first lockdown in 2020 by the Centre for Catalyzing Change (C3), an organisation that works with adolescents in multiple states, found that nearly half of the boys and girls surveyed reported increased stress at home. They were worried about the loss of livelihood and income in the family, and the stress of managing day-to-day living in the absence of remittances by those working elsewhere. The closure of schools and the accompanying loss of peer networks also added to their stress levels. Older adolescent girls bore the increased burden of household chores and caring for their siblings. They also experienced constant fear about contracting the virus.

Given all these factors, mental health became a critical issue to contend with. Dr Aparajita Gogoi, executive director of C3, says, “Their parents were not going out to work; they were not going to school. Everyone was at home all the time. Moreover, many family members had lost their jobs. Many of the girls also worried about whether they would be allowed to go to school once everything opened up. Would they be able to cope with or complete their studies? Would they get a job? Would they just be married off instead?”

In many cases, adolescents in districts such as Gumla, Lohardaga, and West Singhbhum didn’t know whom to reach out to when they experienced anxiety, stress, or depression. Because, as Aparajita says, “The problem is that mental health services do not reach the last mile in our country.” To help address some of this, C3 created several short, WhatsAppable public service ads that talked about how stress and mental health issues can be identified and whom to reach out to for support.

Chaitali also refers to the heightened levels of isolation that girls experienced. “We were hearing a lot about children facing anxiety and confusion. They didn’t know whom to go to. To address this, in June 2021, we launched ‘Connect Karo’—a toll-free number that they could call. The idea was to break isolation, especially in light of the devastation and grief that so many were experiencing during that time. Over a period of four months, we had about 400 girls in Jharkhand calling the number just to speak to somebody. They had been locked in and didn’t know what was happening, and so they were anxious, confused, and had several questions about their future.”

The silver lining though was that talking about mental health became less of a taboo. A majority of the participants in the C3 survey voiced the need to end the stigma around mental health, and be provided access to non-judgmental, confidential, affordable mental health care to cope with stress, the pressure of studies, bullying, depression, and anxiety. Nonprofits, for their part, are taking advantage of the destigmatisation to identify ways to provide mental health services in their areas of operation.

The increased digital divide between young girls and boys will have far-reaching consequences

Much has been written about the increased digital divide created by the pandemic. Access to devices has always been a barrier, with only 20 percent of girls in Jharkhand owning a mobile phone in comparison to 39 percent of boys. However, the impact was harsher on adolescent girls given their lack of digital literacy.

If you want girls to be socially and financially independent, and live their lives to the fullest, we have to invest in digital literacy.

India alone accounts for nearly 50 percent of the gendered digital divide in the world, with a mere one-third of the total internet users in India being women. Aparajita says, “What really came to the fore during the pandemic was that if you want adolescent girls to make the transition from schools and colleges to workplaces, it is extremely important for them to be digitally literate.”

The world is becoming digital first—be it for learning, jobs, entertainment, or shopping—and the lack of digital literacy is going to push more and more adolescent girls back. “If you want girls to be socially and financially independent, and live their lives to the fullest, we have to invest in digital literacy,” she says. 

However, she also points out that to become digitally literate, girls first need to have basic language literacy and numeracy skills. “If they don’t have basic numeracy and literacy, if they do not know how to read texts, it’s very difficult to be digitally literate. So, we need to think of how we can introduce digital literacy to girls who are being left out. Targeted last-mile connectivity in deprived villages, panchayats, and blocks with affordable access to personal or community devices and affordable internet access are real needs”.

She also talks about how quickly girls learnt things that mattered to them. “In Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand we were teaching them how to open a file or write an e-mail. But they wanted us to show them how to do online shopping, execute digital payments, access entitlements, or use the internet to get an Aadhaar/ration card for their parents.” Learning these skills made them the go-to people for their families for activities such as accessing government schemes and digital transfer of money.

Girls will have to navigate the digital world, whether to book train tickets, apply for scholarships, or join the workforce. It is imperative to ask if they are being given the opportunity and the tools to do so.

Aspirations versus social and economic barriers

Despite the sense of gloom they experienced during the pandemic, girls have strong aspirations. In a survey conducted by C3 in Gumla and Lohardaga districts in March 2022, as part of a child marriage prevention project, 70 percent of the girls surveyed said they wanted to work. Their responses to a question about aspirations varied from wanting to run their own business to becoming reporters, scientists, fashion designers, goat farmers, and nurses. Many wanted to learn cooking, masonry, computers, and beauty/wellness. About a quarter of them said that they wanted government jobs. When asked about the barriers they would face in achieving their dreams, most cited being forced to drop out of school and having to do household chores.

Aparajita points out, “The reality is that their dreams are pitted against entrenched barriers—family expectations, safety, mobility, and a lack of skills. They also don’t have any role models in their real lives, so their aspirations are fuelled by what they see in the digital world—girls working, travelling, or selling beauty and fashion products. They relate to that much more than us showing them an inspiring film on a female achiever.”

The way forward

Nonprofit leaders agree that the real work to rebuild and restore begins now. If we don’t, we will realise in five years that it was a missed opportunity, and that these young women have dropped out of school and fallen back further in the quest for employment and work-readiness.

To prevent this from happening, we have to ensure that we invest more in girls’ health and education, and in changing social norms. According to Aparajita, now that we are talking about an economic recovery, it is also a great time to push for gender transformative, inclusive, and intersectional policies. “When we do a budget allocation for education, how can we ensure that it is gender sensitive, or that it is catering to digital equity for girls. We must therefore collect gender-disaggregated data, which tells us about girls’ attendance, re-enrolment, and completion of school.”

She highlights why it is critical to keep girls and women at the centre as we rebuild and reprogramme. “It’s also important to prepare girls to be resilient, and equip them with skills including financial and digital literacy and other 21st-century skills that can help them respond better to future shocks like COVID-19,” she says.

The adolescent girl must be looked at as a whole and not as a sum of parts.

Reinforcing this message, Chaitali adds a note of caution. “We shouldn’t look at things in silos,” she says. “When a crisis hits, it affects everything—health, education, mental well-being, and more. So, any kind of siloed programming or funding doesn’t work. Moreover, any kind of prevention work can’t happen in the midst of a crisis. And it can’t happen right after a crisis either, because the community is still reeling.”

It is therefore imperative that during non-crisis times, both funders and nonprofits invest in a broader programme, and not just on one or two outcomes. The adolescent girl must be looked at as a whole and not as a sum of parts. There are many aspects in her life that are at risk—her education, physical and mental health, agency, and so on.”

Chaitali explains this further. “I understand that funders and government want to work for adolescent girls, but just doing safety sessions with the girls is not going to address the issue. We need regular and sustained work with their families, panchayats, and the wider community. You have to get them on board because it is they, and not the girls, who must take that responsibility of improving their lives.”

Therefore, the question to ask is: How do we build this? Because resilience is not just about bouncing back, but also about moving forward and thriving. When the next crisis happens, are you as a community prepared for it now? Or are you going to go back and take your girls with you to ground zero?

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Know more

• Read this report to gain a deeper understanding how COVID-19 has altered the lived realities of adolescent girls and young women across India.
• Read this article to learn more about the pandemic’s impact on child marriages in India.
• Read this article on data-backed methods for empowering adolescent girls.

While these entrepreneurs remain ambitious and focused on quickly building their businesses, the global resource crunch caused by the pandemic has forced enterprises across most industries to be cautious. So SME owners everywhere now need to rethink how they view themselves, their raison d’etre, their competitiveness and their ambitions.

This will require them to make some hard decisions about whether to invest their time and money in efforts to salvage businesses that are struggling. And given their emotional investment in their enterprises, it can be difficult for them to recognise when the smartest option is to give up and redeploy their efforts toward other businesses or goals.

Supporting India’s SMEs in navigating this crisis requires an integrated and holistic view of all the skills entrepreneurs need to solve the unprecedented problems they’re facing. For these enterprises to recover and grow, they’ll need new sources of competitive advantage, including knowledge, emotional and relationship capital that complements their physical and financial assets and enables informed decision-making. Indeed, developing these alternative forms of capital needs to be SMEs’ top priority if they hope to remain competitive.

Below, I’ll discuss the urgent need to boost SMEs’ knowledge, emotional and relationship capital both during and after the pandemic, and how current learning and development efforts are falling short in meeting the unique needs of these businesses. Though this analysis will focus on the situation facing Indian SMEs, many of these insights will apply to enterprises across emerging markets.

The need for knowledge capital among Indian SMEs

There is a need for a massive increase in the knowledge and management capabilities of entrepreneurs and their employees in India’s SME community.

These entrepreneurs often lack knowledge of the basic competencies required to run a business, including functional skills in areas like sales, marketing, operations, human resources, finance and legal issues. They also lack skills and knowledge in critical areas like change management, decision-making sciences (e.g., using inductive or deductive logic to make decisions), succession planning, program management, digitalization, etc. These skills are no longer a choice but a necessity, and SME entrepreneurs must learn them.

SME entrepreneurs in India lack the discipline and commitment necessary to manage and sustain their businesses over the long term.

But individual skills are not enough. Policymakers, support organisations and enterprises themselves are taking steps to address the skills gaps among individual SME entrepreneurs, focusing on areas like operational productivity in manufacturing, technical expertise, etc. However, the real need is to focus more broadly, taking the entire organisation and ecosystem into account. This is a critical need that must be looked into.

Finally, the other need which merits immediate attention is the discipline to implement. Typically, based on Wadhwani Advantage’s experience, SME entrepreneurs in India lack the discipline and commitment necessary to manage and sustain their businesses over the long term. Fortunately, these qualities can be learned.

Unfortunately, with the emergence of technology-based education, most skilling initiatives aim to standardise learning, while entrepreneurs’ need for customisation has never been greater. For example, how many learning resources contextualise topics like artificial intelligence and design thinking to the SME environment and its diverse use cases? Taking an online university course on these topics is unattractive for SME entrepreneurs, not only because of the cost, but because these courses do not solve the urgent problems these entrepreneurs are currently facing, nor do they build the skills they need to take their businesses to the next level. The pedagogy does not yield immediate outcomes for them, and doesn’t address the needs and challenges of the enterprise context.

On the other hand, we have many initiatives and “experts” in India, spouting knowledge on skill development for entrepreneurs – often without the necessary academic rigour. Substantial funding is being poured into the development of educational content on these topics, by academia, startups, digital platforms and others. Yet the outcomes generated for SMEs are far from the desired levels of competitiveness, as few of these entrepreneurs take these courses and even fewer apply the learning. For instance, according to Wadhwani Advantage’s research database, there are around 450 colleges in India aimed at entrepreneurs, and that number has quadrupled in the last 15 years. But our research involving around 600 Indian SMEs indicates that even among entrepreneurs with businesses generating $3-10 million in revenue, many do not know the meaning of basic terms like ROCE (Return on Capital Employed). Whether it’s due to lack of uptake of these courses, or the ineffectiveness of their content, this suggests that the learning outcomes of the country’s skilling efforts have been poor, to say the least. Just like in the health sector, where the investment of massive financial capital does not necessarily lead to better health outcomes, we have seen millions of dollars invested in learning and development efforts for entrepreneurs without the commensurate SME outcomes.

Boosting SMEs’ emotional capital

In light of the many evolving challenges facing SMEs, knowledge capital is not enough: Today’s situation demands that the leaders and employees of the millions of small and medium-sized enterprises operating globally also develop strong emotional health. But unfortunately, based on Wadhwani Advantage’s experience working with hundreds of Indian SMEs, little attention is being paid to efforts to restore their emotional health to pre-pandemic levels—a situation that likely also exists in other emerging economies.

Considering the amount of financial capital flowing into businesses, the amount spent fortifying the emotional health of SME entrepreneurs is grossly insufficient. Without adequate attention and considerable investment in strengthening these entrepreneurs’ emotional capital, any returns on financial capital invested in their businesses will be unsustainable. And the emotional fault lines that will eventually undermine these enterprises typically become visible only when it is too late.

Emotions play a disproportionate role in entrepreneurs’ decisions, thereby impacting the performance of their enterprises. Psychologists have introduced several explanations for how emotions can spread and disrupt the behaviours of individuals interacting in workplaces, affecting organisational performance and competitiveness. I have been studying the impact of emotions in SMEs for the past year, and I’ve found that emotions play a far greater role in SMEs than in large corporates, since SMEs rely on a smaller community of staff and supporters whose emotional states can be highly influenced by the emotions of those around them. Yet nevertheless, organisations focused on supporting these businesses pay little attention to these impacts—something that needs to change in order to craft effective interventions to make SMEs large, profitable and sustainable.

Addressing SMEs’ relationship assets

Despite these factors’ importance to SMEs’ success, it is not enough for entrepreneurs to have emotional fortitude and knowledge capital. At the end of the day, these businesses’ performance depends on people acting in concert to execute tasks and strategies—and that depends on how they relate to each other. The business world is replete with examples of what can happen when a company overlooks the importance of relationships—including poor teamwork, poor or toxic work culture, unhealthy competition and HR issues, which fester within enterprises and lead to poor competitiveness and even business failure.

The growing influence of technology in all human interactions has made the relationships between people, employees, customers, and stakeholders more complex than ever.

Relationships are a key factor that influence how people see each other, and how they view the roles they play in achieving a common goal. The competing commitments model, developed by Harvard educational psychologists Bob Kegan and Lisa Lahey, provides a compelling explanation for why people often undermine their progress towards attaining their own, or their organisation’s, goals. The model explains that business leaders’ or workers’ actions may exhibit misalignment with their organisational goals, since each individual may have competing commitments generated by their own implicit (unconscious) values that conflict with the organisational goal they’re consciously pursuing. This conflict often results in harmful interpersonal behaviours, which (unsurprisingly) also cause harm to the enterprise.

Adding to this challenge, the growing influence of technology in all human interactions has made the relationships between people, employees, customers, stakeholders, etc., more complex than ever. SMEs are grappling with how to understand this new technology, how to decipher its impact on their businesses—and how to avoid either being too slow to adopt it and being left behind by competitors, or being too fast, mindlessly chasing new tech solutions without the necessary understanding of how they will impact their relationships.

To take an example that has become common during the pandemic, when analysing the impact of a meeting done on a video call at home versus in person, it’s clear that it is indeed more convenient and efficient to meet over a video call, but it does little to build close relationships. While technology can greatly support the work of SMEs, the ways these businesses are using it are still “dehumanised,” and unfortunately, very little is being done to advance their efforts to build relationships more consciously. For instance, Wadhwani Advantage research has shown that Indian SMEs have accelerated their adoption of digital tools by 74% during the pandemic, but their quality of interactions and customer experience has not commensurately increased. This suggests that relying on these tools to conduct business is efficient but not effective—and perhaps not sustainable—unless equal efforts are made to significantly enhance the customer experience.

SME entrepreneurs need to understand that while high-performing businesses need all the typical ingredients of success—i.e., money, efficiency, time, etc.—the enterprises that stand the test of time also understand the value of knowledge, emotions and relationships. These ingredients are the lifeblood of successful businesses, without which their performance is short-lived and unsustainable.

Whether they work in India or other emerging markets, it’s time for SME owners, entrepreneurs, capital providers, policymakers and other supporters to focus on formulating and implementing an operational plan to build SMEs’ reserves of knowledge, emotional and relationship capital. Without addressing these needs, these enterprises’ recovery from the pandemic—and their long-term viability—will be at risk.

This article is part of NextBillion’s “Recovery” series, which explores how businesses, development initiatives and the communities they serve in low- and middle-income countries are building greater resilience for a post-pandemic future.

This article was originally published on NextBillion.

Given these extreme levels of poverty, a significant percentage of the men in these regions worked outside the state before the spread of COVID-19. And we know that the national lockdown on March 23, 2020, brought many of them back home to their villages.

The first wave led to increasing mental health issues and limited recourse

During the start of the pandemic in April–May 2020, when migrants returned to their villages, the focus was on ration and relief. According to Deo Datt Singh, director of operations at PANI—a nonprofit that works extensively in the districts of eastern Uttar Pradesh—the families and villages of these workers welcomed them even though there was some apprehension of them bringing the virus back from the cities.

In a couple of months, however, he says, things started changing. “The substantial increase in the number of people in the villages due to the returning migrants started putting pressure on food and work. Locals were afraid that the migrants might start claiming a stake in their properties because they were now staying here. Quarrels broke out in homes and people were worried about how they would produce enough to take care of the whole family on their limited land.” 

On the migrants’ front, the adjustment was equally hard. Of those who had returned, there were two categories: the first included those who were willing to do mazdoori and non-skilled work—they availed of work under MNREGA and got their rations from PDS; hence, they were able to survive. The second segment comprised semi-skilled workers—those who had worked in Gujarat in diamond polishing, saree manufacturing, and so on. Deo Datt says that this adjustment was harder for them, and they started developing psychological issues and mental trauma. 

While locals were able to connect to some form of work, and secure rations and entitlements due to the work of nonprofits in the region, there were no facilities or access to mental health treatment in most places in eastern Uttar Pradesh. Additionally, whatever was available was too expensive. Noticing the prevalence of mental health issues among an increasing number of migrants, PANI started arranging for counselling and even clinical treatment where required.

When the workers living in cities and towns returned home, PANI had started creating a database of the migrants—mapping the villages they had returned to—and meeting them individually and in groups. They also organised health camps, primarily to arrange medicine and check-ups for people who might be putting off treatment or medication for their diseases because of lack of money and no access to healthcare facilities at this time. The government health centres were focussing entirely on COVID-19 specific issues because of the lockdown. That’s when they began noticing anger issues, anxiety, and stress among people.

“We started engaging psychologists who helped draw up questionnaires that would enable us to identify if someone was going into depression. Then we’d invite them for short individual sessions, some of which were online. We picked out people who were showing symptoms like insomnia, anger, and poor appetite, and gave them help. Critical cases were referred to big cities like Lucknow and Varanasi,” explained Deo Datt. 

Some went back to the cities; some stayed behind

When the first wave receded and lockdown was lifted in parts of the country, some people were ready to go back but many weren’t. These included those who had come back after facing a great deal of hardship and were scared of enduring it again if there was another lockdown. According to Deo Datt, the other set included those who were older, say, above 55 years, who had decided to just stay on now that they were back. The young men mostly all returned.

We observed that those engaged in hard labour tended to age faster due to wear and tear.

He cites PANI data to show the trends. The organisation had worked with 55,000 migrant labourers until 2018 and had kept track of these people since then. From this list, around 7,000 workers had returned to their villages. When PANI surveyed them after three months, 4,000 of these had gone back to the cities. The remaining 3,000 who had stayed behind were all getting on in age and weren’t able to do any skilled work. 

Deo Datt says, “During those times, we had observed that those engaged in hard labour tended to age faster due to wear and tear. So those who were older, unskilled, and not up to physical labour any more stayed behind. Those whose families supported them after they came back also didn’t leave.”

Government entitlements increased significantly during this time

Between the first two waves, people got double rations, MNREGA was actively encouraged, and the government started providing Ayushman Bharat gold cards with a health cover of INR 5 lakh. “Earlier the BOCW card gave labourers benefits under 14 schemes. Now under the government’s e-SHRAM card there was a promise of getting INR 500 every month. All these became hugely popular and many people approached us to get these immediate tangible benefits,” says Deo Datt.

According to him, the driving force for this release of entitlements was election-related. “The state of Uttar Pradesh had panchayat elections in February 2021, and existing panchayats and their members worked hard in the run-up and during COVID in the hope of getting re-elected. However, some of them couldn’t recontest because certain seats were reserved for women and SC/ST categories. The new panchayati raj institution (PRI) members who got elected were also committed to working for their communities in these difficult times. They would hold camps in villages where people could come for their entitlements and applications. As a result, the villagers benefited from the efforts of both the outgoing and incoming PRIs, and the uptake of schemes was great.” 

Nonprofits pivoted to providing social security benefits

With both the state and citizens focusing on government schemes, several organisations working on education, agriculture, livelihoods, and gender also incorporated working on government schemes as part of their core programmes. For the duration of the lockdowns, social security schemes became their primary work.

They did this for two reasons: (a) this was where the demand and urgent need came from (that is, the people ravaged by loss of livelihoods), and (b) work in the nonprofits’ core area of expertise had stopped or slowed down, especially if they had been involved in education, water and sanitation, gender training, etc. Most nonprofits being community-centric listened to what their constituents were asking for and adapted their models to address this need for welfare benefits. They were able to gauge and pivot quickly to the needs of the people in distress, and respond to them in real time. They also realised that donors were open to funding this kind of work.

What can funders do?

Support what the people want

With the strong push from the government to deliver welfare schemes to its citizens, people are focused on procuring their identity documents that verify their gender, income, caste, domicile, disability, and so on. These are the first-step documents for anything that people want to access in the government or private sphere.

Most companies want to allocate their CSR funds for vaccination but not for long-term livelihood sustainability.

According to Aniket Doegar, founder of Haqdarshak—an organisation that helps people access benefits and entitlements due to them—the first point of demand from the communities he’s worked with is always around documentation. This is because caste certificates help men access their land rights, allow their daughters to avail of a scholarship, and enable their parents to get pensions. “The demand is for Aadhaar and PAN cards, linking of their documents to their bank accounts, and birth and caste certificates. It would help the local communities if funders— philanthropic foundations as well as CSR—could step forward to fund these documentation needs of the people,” he adds.

Deo Datt says that philanthropic funding for long-term development of communities just isn’t available. Most companies want to allocate their CSR funds for vaccination but not for long-term livelihood sustainability or community-resilience programmes.

Collaborate with banks and the financial system

While there is an increasing amount of collaboration among funders, nonprofits, and governments for specific projects, there is a need for the development sector ecosystem to start engaging with the financial system as well.

This is key because there has been a growing and significant demand for credit in rural India. According to Aniket, be it farmers, construction workers, or someone in the gig economy, the Haqdarshak team has observed that the overarching need among the people they work with is of how to access credit. “Formal credit tends to come through a financial institution, as does money from government schemes, which comes via banks. And there is almost no relationship between the funding ecosystem in our sector and banks. Most of the CSR or philanthropic foundations do not want to collaborate with the big banking systems and really unlock the power of welfare programs. But that is what citizens want,” he says. 

Invest in training and technology

Aniket also re-emphasises the need for funders and nonprofits to invest in understanding how government schemes can be delivered equitably, especially in districts that have poor human development indicators. According to him, this segment hasn’t received as much attention as other sectors such as education, healthcare, water, and so on. “The social security space is nascent in our development sector. There hasn’t been enough investment in aspects of building platforms, conducting trainings, investing in technology, and sharing data. We have moved straight to the outcome—of wanting people to get immediate financial benefits without making the necessary investments,” he adds.

The need for sustainable financial support is massive in this part of the state, given its multidimensional poverty and the complex intersections of caste, religion, and income. In addition to providing sustainable and long-term livelihood opportunities, it is equally vital that these most vulnerable citizens are onboarded on to government systems, so that they can avail of the benefits they are entitled to. 

Know more

• Read the ILO’s policy brief on protecting migrant workers during COVID-19.
• Read this article on the effects of COVID-19 on Indian migrant workers.
• Read this article for more information on migrant workers in India.

Despite the lack of an official record, it is clear that the pandemic has left thousands of women newly widowed. Many have lost the sole breadwinner of their families and are struggling to manage the double burden of grief and making a living. In the Indian context this is a matter of grave concern as single women are stigmatised, excluded, and marginalised by the community and government policies alike. The social impacts of an increasing number of single women aside, the COVID-19-led crisis is also aggravating the ‘feminisation of agriculture’ in rural India. This is interpreted as an increase in women being included in the unpaid agriculture labour force (working on their own land) under adverse conditions without decision-making power, owing to disparity in land ownership.

While there is a lack of gender-differentiated data on land ownership, the agricultural census provides information in the form of operational holdings along with some information on its social composition. In India only 12.8 percent of land holdings are under the ownership of women, covering a land area of 10.3 percent. In the state of Gujarat, this is only marginally higher—women own 14.1 percent of land holdings and have 13.2 percent share in land area.

Despite legal and policy recognition, women’s land rights are deeply enmeshed in discriminatory sociocultural norms and patriarchal customary practices. In the absence of a concerted effort by the state to address gender inequality, there is a wide gap between the enabling legal framework and the actual extent to which such rights are exercised. Men and boys are undisputed heirs to land whereas women’s claim over right to land is almost always questioned and met with opposition and, often, violence.

The virus may be gender-neutral but its effects are not

Since the outbreak of the pandemic, we at SWATI have undertaken studies to understand the gendered impact of the pandemic on women and girls—the impact of COVID-19 on women’s land rights is a major area of inquiry. Land is an important resource in rural areas and land-based livelihoods contribute to 70 percent of rural livelihoods. With over 85 percent rural women engaged in agriculture, we wanted to understand the impact on access to land or inheritance for women who had lost their husbands, fathers, fathers-in-law, and other male landowning members.

Between March 15 and May 15, 2021, we conducted a dipstick study in five blocks (Dasada, Dhrangadhra, Santrampur, Siddhpur, and Radhanpur) of three districts (Surendranagar, Mahisagar, and Patan) in 40 villages of Gujarat. Four hundred and seventy-three deaths due to COVID-19 or suspected COVID-19 were reported during this period, of which 63 percent were men and 27 percent were women.

Interviews and focus group discussions with women revealed the specific challenges that they face in accessing their land rights, which are dependent on the woman’s relation with the male landholding and decision-taking member of the family, her age, whether she has children, if her children are girls, and various other subjective factors.

Women’s land rights continue to be mediated through their relationship with men

Recently widowed Sangeetaben, 26 has a four-year-old son. The family lived in Patdi town where her husband had a government job with the electricity department. After his death, Sangeetaben and her son have moved in with her late husband’s family in Mithaghoda village, 16 kilometres from Patdi town.

With the death of male members come many social sanctions and restrictions that disadvantage women.

Sangeetaben admitted she did not have any details of the family’s land. “I know that the land belongs to my father-in-law, but I don’t know if anybody else’s names are on the land. I don’t even know if my husband’s name is on the land.” At first, Sangeetaben denied anticipating any challenges in having her name on the land document. “It won’t be a problem since I have a son,” but later added, “It won’t happen soon, as I am still young. My brother-in-law is still unmarried. My name won’t be added to the land document until he gets married.” The possibility that Sangeetaben might be married off to her brother-in-law hung unspoken in the air.

With the death of male members come many social sanctions and restrictions that disadvantage women.

Leeliben, 48, of Mithaghoda lost her husband to COVID-19. She worries about her dependency on her brother-in-law to undertake procedures relating to the inclusion of her name in the family land register. Protocol requires that the process to add names of successors be completed within a month. Post this period the case will have to be taken to the district office, which can be complicated and expensive. However, the custom demands that a widow not step out of the house for six months after her husband’s death.

Women are keen to secure their land rights but lack the social support to obtain them

Neelaben, 43, of village Upariyala, lived in Ahmedabad with her husband and their three children. After her husband’s death from COVID-19, she returned to her village with her children. Neelaben is being denied possession of the land by her brother-in-law. With no income, she has to resort to doing wage labour on others’ farms to feed her family while staying at her in-laws’ house. Lacking support, she is wary of taking up a fight to claim her share.

Women face ‘othering’ by their families and their claims are resisted.

Kajalben, 29, reported that her father-in-law passed away during the pandemic and now all the family members’ names will be added to the land title. On being asked if her name will be added, she said, “Oh no. Who will trust a daughter-in-law who has entered the household just yesterday?”

Jeetiben, 50, was left behind with three daughters and 25 acres of land owned by her husband. Jeetiben’s father-in-law is putting pressure on her to add the names of her brother-in-law’s sons to her husband’s land instead of her and her daughters’ names. He says, “We will look after you, but the land should remain in the family.” 

Women are compelled to ‘voluntarily’ waive off their rights

Fifty-year-old Lasuben Rabari of Goriyawad village lost her husband and both in-laws within the span of a few days in the second wave. As per the family custom, Lasuben is not allowed to step outside the house for a year. The 30-bigha land in her father-in-law’s name was shared equally by Lasuben’s husband and brother-in-law. After the deaths, Lasuben’s brother-in-law initiated the land mutation process (the transfer or change of land title entries in revenue records of the local municipal corporation) and had his name and Lasuben’s and her children’s (five daughters and one son) names added in the land records.

Soon after, on the advice of a revenue talati (official), Lasuben’s brother-in-law compelled Lasuben to waive off her and her daughters’ rights in favour of Lasuben’s son on the grounds that it would be easier to avail schemes and loans if there are fewer names in the land records. Although Lasuben and her daughters agreed and appeared before the court to register their legal waiver, they feel that having their names in the land records would have given them a sense of security for the future.

Customary practices and a patriarchal state

Customary practices such as keeping the land in the eldest son’s or brother’s name to avoid fragmentation and keep the joint family together no longer benefit anyone, and particularly harm women.

Sisters-in-law Kantaben (63) and Vijuben (65) used to till their family-owned landholdings of 15 bighas. The land is in the name of their eldest brother-in-law. When their husbands were alive, they tilled the 5 bigha share of land each brother owned informally. Now the eldest brother-in-law refuses to let either of the women cultivate the land. They have had to seek work as labourers on others’ farms in the village. The widowed women have barely managed to make INR 3–4,000 this agricultural season, and they won’t find more work until the agricultural season next year.

There is a wide gap between the enabling legal framework and the actual extent to which women’s land rights are exercised.

There is a wide gap between the enabling legal framework and the actual extent to which women’s land rights are exercised. The government, along with civil society organisations, must take the lead in recognising that for inclusive, equitable, and sustainable growth and long-term recovery from the pandemic, rural women’s asset strength and fallback positions must be made stronger. This can be done by:

• ensuring implementation of existing gender equitable land and agricultural policies and working to mitigate the contradictions posed by customary practices and the formal legal system
• reviewing and subsidising the input cost for small and marginal holdings and ensuring minimum support price
• affirmative actions and policies to promote women’s tenurial security, access to inputs and credit, drudgery reducing tools, and facilitating women’s access to markets
• undertaking mass campaigns to increase women’s literacy about their land rights and addressing discriminatory practices
• setting up time-bound, gender-sensitive, and single-window clearance mechanisms for women to seek guidance, counsel, and legal administrative services for their land claims

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Know more

• Read about the socio-economic impact of COVID-19 on women from low-income households.
• Learn more about how the pandemic has affected women’s land rights.

Farmers in rural India were dealing with a peculiar problem. They had their produce, but since markets were shut during the lockdown there was no place to sell. Further, many bank branches were closed and ATMs were far away. With restrictions on travel, cash was practically out of reach, which curtailed people’s buying power.

Communities had to look for alternate modes of survival. One approach that some of them took was a return to the barter system—a solution they were familiar with. People bartered perishable goods such as vegetables, kirana stores in villages provided essentials in exchange for wheat, and food grains became a currency to pay children’s tuition fees. Those who did not have goods offered physical labour in exchange.        

How did the transition happen?

Communities in rural India have been practising barter for centuries. In states such as Assam, where barter was extremely popular during the pandemic, it has been celebrated in the form of a fair called Jonbeel Mela for more than five centuries now. Markets have evolved, and there have been many changes in the way business transactions work, but barter continues to thrive in the close-knit communities of the villages. This is because villages unlike cities are driven by producers as much as consumers and the rural societies survive on trust.

The close relationships that people share also allow for easier collectivisation and mobilisation. This was evident during the pandemic when people navigated various COVID-19 safety norms to meet individual and community needs. 

Beauty Dutta Borah, a farmer and a grocery store owner in Kawoimari, Sivasagar district, Assam, says that during the pandemic she bartered not only goods, but also services such as getting people to reap and thresh the rice crop. “In most instances I had to just call out to a neighbour for this,” she explains. Dutta Borah adds that goods from various wholesale stores like hers moved across districts often in a single transport vehicle from the village. “A car goes from our village across Sivasagar district twice a week. It can be my car or anyone else’s from the locality. We collect goods from the various local stores and sell it to people at once,” she adds.        

A resident of Chetti Thirukonam in Ariyalur district of Tamil Nadu, R Raja compares barter to debit and credit card payments that people in the cities use. He calls it an ‘older form of cashless payment’ that rural communities returned to.

New meanings of an old concept

Nonprofits working in the livelihoods sector in rural India are aware of this well-oiled barter machinery. This has allowed them to work with communities for their sustenance—especially in spaces where income alone is not enough for survival. However, since barter is a localised form of exchange, the organisations have also had to develop a nuanced understanding of cultural contexts and histories.

When Drishtee, a nonprofit that works with rural entrepreneurs, developed a mobile barter application during the pandemic, they chose Sivasagar district to start with. The nonprofit’s regional head of the Northeast, Paragdhar Konwar, said that it was a conscious decision considering the region’s history. “Sivasagar was the capital of the Ahom dynasty, which ruled Assam for six centuries. People here have followed the same age-old practices, including that of barter, for a long time now.”

Nonprofits using barter during the pandemic found that it was particularly popular among low-income households and women in rural India.

As a result, there was pre-existing community knowledge waiting to be harvested. Konwar adds, “We told people that you will be continuing with the binimoy protha (exchange tradition) before explaining the renewed importance of barter during the pandemic.” The mobile application was used by people in Assam to exchange rice for oil and ducks for chicken eggs and to avail tractor-operated-rice-mill services when mills nearby were shutting down. 

For Goonj, a nonprofit that works on community development, barter is core to their work, and a philosophy it embraced even before the pandemic. The names of its initiatives such as Vaapsi (giving back) and ideas such as ‘cloth for work’—aimed at building sustainable livelihoods—are borrowed from the cultural vocabulary of India. Thus, in times of crisis when Goonj mobilises people, it does so from a place of wanting to revive extant concepts rather than introducing jargon that communities might find difficult to comprehend.

Anshu Gupta, founder director at Goonj, says, “I believe we aren’t doing anything new. We are valuing what already exists. Village wisdom has always been valued in the villages, perhaps it wasn’t by people like us. We are just working with that community knowledge and recognising it.”

What does barter do for the communities?

Apart from facilitating hyperlocal markets during emergencies, barter also has other advantages for communities. Nonprofits using barter during the pandemic found that it was particularly popular among low-income households and women in rural India.

In cash-poor regions, barter helps people meet their needs locally—be it for immediate necessities, such as food grains, or a used smartphone.

In cash-poor regions, barter helps people meet their needs locally—be it for immediate necessities, such as food grains, or a used smartphone. Additionally, barter is a viable way for local producers to sell their products. These are producers who cannot avail the benefits of e-commerce platforms or access urban markets, which are driven by large production volumes, standardised packaging, and homogenised aesthetics.

People have also used barter to work on community issues such as lack of water, sanitation, and infrastructure. Goonj, for instance, has used barter as a reward for labour. Villagers work on solving local problems on their own, and are rewarded in the form of goods that often travel from cities to them. Gupta says, “Typically people wait for access to a government scheme to address their local-level problems. Meanwhile, there are unused materials in the city, for which there is demand in villages.” The nonprofit connects these two. Gupta adds, “Just imagine a situation: You give a person a shirt and the next day you say, ‘This is mine,’ he will say, ‘Yes, it is yours.’ But if a person is building a road or working on a water body for his village and you give him a shirt as a reward, he will say, ‘It might be yours, but I have earned it.’”

Barter opens up avenues for rural women who often do not have access to cash and markets. Satyan Mishra, co-founder and managing director at Drishtee, says, “Women who were earlier making things just for themselves saw barter as a big opportunity.” They started exchanging hand-made products for goods that they or their families wanted. In Varanasi, women were found bartering hair for goods. Monixa Bordoloi, a resident of Dhekeria Gaon, Sonitpur district, Assam, asserts that she will continue to barter whether or not there is a pandemic. She says, “Women barter things they need, not what they already have.” 

Can barter replace cash?

Despite the many innovative ways in which people have used barter, cash remains a necessity for many of people’s needs. For instance, while parents of students in Begusarai district, Bihar, have been able to use barter for their children’s education, they have not been able to pay their medical bills using the same method. 

The world is therefore unlikely to shift overnight to a system of social exchange. Most aspects of our lives will continue to be defined by abstract monetary currencies. There will also be people’s aspirations that can only be met with money. For this we will need jobs, job securities, equal opportunities for education, affordable health care, and more. But as many rural communities using barter confirm, it will coexist as a parallel economy embodying the many intangibles of a human society, such as trust, goodwill, and resistance.

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Know more

• Learn how Auroville in Tamil Nadu is building a money-less society.
• Read this story of a song and movie exchange store in New Delhi.

This is the reality that families across India faced as the crisis deepened, and this is what confronted nonprofits throughout the length and breadth of the country. Before the pandemic, more than 4.1 million girls¹ were not going to school across India. The closure of 1.5 million schools during the pandemic has further impacted over 247 million children enrolled in elementary and secondary schools.

It is now estimated that almost 11 million girls are at risk of dropping out of school. Even before the pandemic hit, one out of five girls would drop out of school in Rajasthan, and now due to COVID-19, 14.9 percent children have not even enrolled in schools. The case is similar in Uttar Pradesh, where 54 percent of girls are not sure whether they will return to school post the pandemic.

Nonprofits had to balance the reality of meeting immediate basic needs with anticipating the lasting impact of the crisis on the future of our children. The pandemic and the subsequent lockdowns pushed around 230 million people into extreme poverty in 2020. Consequently, many households in remote parts of India have had to reduce food intake and resort to child labour, forcing many young girls into early marriage and caregiving roles, and making them susceptible to violence and trafficking.

During the COVID-19 crisis, our work at Educate Girls gave us deep insights into the community, and we’ve had to navigate a very sharp learning curve. Over the last 18 months, more than 15,000 members of Team Balika—a group of village-based community volunteers involved in efforts to ensure education for girls—have worked closely with more than 2.3 lakh children through our community learning initiative called Camp Vidya, reaching 20,000 villages in 21 districts across Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh where 40 percent of India’s out-of-school girls live.  

Here are some of our learnings from the pandemic, and things we need to prioritise as we move forward so that children affected by COVID-19 return to school.

1. The sector must adopt a multipronged approach to ensure no child is left behind

The pandemic compounded existing inequalities in the country and impacted different subgroups disproportionately. We, therefore, need to adopt a planned, multipronged approach to ensure that children affected by COVID-19 in different ways continue their schooling.

We need to identify children who are permanently at risk of not returning to school.

For instance, for children who were already in school before the pandemic, we need to look at existing school records and ensure that they return without exception. Next, we have to identify new entrants who have attained schooling age, as well as the children of migrant workers who could not access schooling after shifting to a new location. Although difficult, we need to have a system in place to identify each one of them and encourage them to join school. We also need to focus on children belonging to transition grades, especially primary to secondary, where the dropout rates, particularly for girls, are high.

Lastly, we need to identify children who are permanently at risk of not returning to school. These would be children orphaned during COVID-19 and older girls who may now not be eligible for mainstreaming. For example, girls who turned 14 in March 2020 face the highest risk of not returning to school as they would have crossed the age eligibility criteria for admission as per the Right to Education Act. They are also most likely to be married off or expected to take up caregiving roles, further curtailing their return to school. We need an alternate education plan for these children.

2. Policymakers should focus on creating incentives to get children back in school

As we emerge from the pandemic, policies and policymakers must keep the most vulnerable communities at the centre of their thinking and strategy. This holds true particularly for girls as they are now more exposed to gender-based violence, early marriage, forced labour, trafficking, and so on. Therefore, a convergence in education, public health, and agency building is critical. Focusing on vocational training for girls and provision of healthcare and hygiene facilities in schools can be key components in this strategy. An urgent policy-level intervention is also required to make education compulsory for all girls.

More importantly, think tanks, researchers, and policymakers must look to create a set of incentives and support programmes that shift the focus back on education for marginalised communities. For example, schools can be incentivised and rewarded based on their capacity to accommodate children like Rekha from low-income households; the government can consider providing free education to girls up to graduation; more seats can be added in government-funded residential hostels such as Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalayas; and plans can be made to accommodate and allocate extra resources for schools in rural areas where migrant children have returned so as to ensure enough food for an expanded population.

Building back better

To build back a better education system, our goal should be to recover the children that lost out on education during the pandemic. We need to put in focused efforts to reform and build back the system in a way that better accommodates the needs of all children, so that no one gets left behind.

Our efforts should include:

• Identifying gaps and assessing the current economic and educational status of the children through door-to-door surveys.
• Focusing on direct and continuous interactions with parents to encourage increased attendance of children, including those at the highest risk of dropping out.
• Conducting regular dialogues between community-based organisations and Panchayati Raj institutions to help prevent child marriages. Civil society organisations and nonprofits will also need to lead counselling sessions for the communities they work with to ensure instances of early marriage, child trafficking, and child labour are identified and curbed.
• Providing in-kind support such as mid-day meals to help families overcome the increased costs of sending children to school, and supplying basic safety and hygiene kits. This could encourage re-enrolment, particularly for the most vulnerable.
• Incorporating bridge courses that help children overcome their learning losses, so that the gap created in education does not impact their learning in the future. This must be followed by age-appropriate learning programmes in the curriculum as children from diverse age groups come back to school. The new curriculum should also focus on the mental and physical well-being of children, given that they missed out almost entirely on learning and interacting with peers during the pandemic.
• Launching a campaign aimed at getting girls back to school with active support from school management committees and the local government. This is critical as the chances of girls dropping out are higher this year due to the added economic strain caused by COVID-19.

Inclusive funding will be paramount

We have to recognise the fact that the current national and global financing for education is just not sufficient. The funding gap, as estimated by a number of thought leaders, is approximately USD 75 billion per year. And this is just enough to ensure that every child receives an education—this is just the shortfall.

Funding must be inclusive and focus on initiatives that ensure access to quality education for the most vulnerable children.

The pandemic witnessed rigorous fundraising activities both at the government and non-government levels. Most of these funding initiatives focused on direct relief measures. In the beginning of the pandemic, the focus was largely on providing daily supplies to the masses and setting up digital facilities for education, and this was non-inclusive in nature. In the second wave, the focus shifted to meeting medical emergencies such as oxygen cylinders and ventilators. The massive disproportionate spending on these causes led to the neglect of issues such as education for the most marginalised.

Now, as we seek to build an education system that can withstand future shocks and ensure that no child is left behind, we truly need a war chest. We must be able to persuade global and domestic donors as well as governments that more funding is needed. However, at the same time, this funding must be inclusive and focus on initiatives that ensure access to quality education for the most vulnerable children. And as we dive deeper into the problems related to the lack of access to resources and education for the most vulnerable communities, it is time to come together and address the problems at the grassroots, keeping the well-being of girls on priority.

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Footnotes:

1. Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India, 2017. Effectiveness with Equity: Raising Learning for Marginalized Girls Through CAMFED’s Program – Research for Equitable Access and Learning, 2018.

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Know more

• Watch how Monica got back to school and learn more about Educate Girls’ community pathways that bridge the gender gap in education.
• Read this article to learn more about different programmes in Zambia and Congo to ensure girls return to school.
• Read about how a child protection volunteer has kept her community safe during the pandemic.