In 1950, India made a Constitutional commitment to provide free and compulsory education to all children up to the age of 14. In 2002, a constitutional amendment made free and compulsory education a fundamental right for children aged 6–14.

Yet, universal access to elementary education remains elusive and quality of provision erratic. When talking of unequal access, education in the Indian context is very much dependent on one’s social conditions defined historically by their caste, creed or their ethnicity besides gender. According to Franco and Chan, ‘Varna discourse’ integrates into a hierarchical pattern, the various empirical ‘Jatis’ as well as occupation.

We as a society collectively stand on a point of time, with the pandemic unravelling all our hidden skeletons, revealing that the deepest roots of inequality are based in the lack of unequal access to those on the margins, those who remain vulnerable socially, economically, or physically years after independence from the colonial reign in India. The rich and the social elite continue to sabotage most of the resources, leaving a scarcity even in the education sector for all those who are the others.

SOCIO — ECONOMIC DISPARITY AND UNEQUAL EDUCATIONAL ACCESS :

INDICATORS OF ACCESS CLASS, CASTE, GENDER AND REGION

Students from the richest 20% of the society are seventeen times more likely to be studying law than those from the poorest 20%. And a student who does not belong to Other Backward Class (OBC), scheduled class (SC) or scheduled tribe (ST) is six times more likely to be studying management than a Scheduled Tribe (ST) student in India.

Girls are less likely to be getting English medium education than boys, and more women take up humanities than men in India.

There is an intricate relation between how the educational facilities are distributed largely on the basis of the social positioning of people in our society. Those living in the urban settlements having access to well-maintained ‘Kendriya Vidyalayas’ ( Centre— run schools) are created primarily for wards of transferable officials of the state like many of our peers, while I see the condition of government run schools or colleges in sub-urban or rural settlements that remain in dire need of hospitable infrastructure and quality education for students from all (recognized and unrecognized) genders.

The same is accepted by the ruling parties at large, with efforts on visible levels to accommodate the rich and the poor, the advantaged and the disadvantaged, the social elites as well those on the margins all under the umbrella of education for all. The effort, although holistic, is bogus in application as the policies in themselves are systemically rooted in enabling inequality.

The National Law universities, The IITs, the IIMs of the country are considered to be the most “prestigious” institutions for studying fields like law, Science or Management, but owing to extremely high fee demands in these institutions, a majority of the social clout remains sabotaged by the few rich families and their prodigies.

The Rural and the sub-urban settlements are largely inhabited by agricultural classes with mostly those belonging to the lowest of varnas and jatis or groups in the social ladder, who sometimes are also working as bounded labourers. This stands true in most remote feudal villages in Bihar. Most of the land in such villages still largely remains under the hold of a few landed gentry who compel the village families to be bound as contractual labourers for them, in exchange of land and money.

Such realities are very rarely highlighted in urban debates on unequal access to education, where the debate mostly seems to be focused on certain income groups. The landed gentry, for their own benefits, perpetuate unequal access to the underprivileged village community. This is deeply rooted in feudal patriarchy and gendered ideas of access to basic amenities like educational institutions.

The government-owned schools in several village are hardly filled with students who belong to the lowest sections of the village social structure because their families remain stuck in the vicious cycle of contractual work and debts that they owe to the village gentry, something that takes their whole life to pay back and pushes them into debt slavery, forcing them to sideline education and provide labour to the gentry for meagre amounts of loaned money.

Deriving conclusions from these understandings of structural flaws in the educational system, I would conclude here by stating that with a pandemic further dismantling classroom education, there has emerged an alarming level of gap, with the digital divide, rooted in caste, class and gender in the first place, causing further distress to those on the peripheries of the social structure.

Hence, a need is felt more alarmingly to bring about a more drastic change, to schooling systems, that is segregated by class, wealth, ethnicity, gender or other signifiers of privilege and exclusion which only cements further layers of inequality.

Originally published at https://mypoliticaltrajectory.blogspot.com.

Indian social spaces are usually very overwhelmed with crowds and chaos, be it on the streets or within a household gathering. More if one lives in a joint family, of course. The take-away for me from this pandemic definitely is that we need to avoid crowding spaces and that too so regularly. We barely care to think how our presence in places affects so many who are helping us in the day — to — day activities, like the sweepers on the streets or the sanitation workers in our household and in our privileged residences.

Vaccine equity still remains a distant plan with so many fearing the after-effects of the vaccine and the new Delta-variant that is looming upon us every day.

Madhu Pai, MD, PhD on Twitter: "After India & Nepal, Delta variant is ripping through Asia!Look at the exponential surges in Bangladesh, Myanmar, Indonesia & ThailandVaccine coverage (1 dose) is only 3 - 11% in these nations. Impossible to contain this devastating variant.Vaccine equity is URGENT!!!!!!! pic.twitter.com/26rSRerMWc / Twitter"

After India & Nepal, Delta variant is ripping through Asia!Look at the exponential surges in Bangladesh, Myanmar, Indonesia & ThailandVaccine coverage (1 dose) is only 3 - 11% in these nations. Impossible to contain this devastating variant.Vaccine equity is URGENT!!!!!!! pic.twitter.com/26rSRerMWc

When COVID began to spread like wild — fire, it spread downwards. It was brought to the social spaces by the relatively richer or more privileged people. The ones who got infected vastly included these sanitation cleaners, community workers and for them, everything remained out of reach for too long.

From the vaccines to the oxygen cylinders, everything was being sold on overpriced rates. Who could buy these amenities then? The same people with privileges so abundant that nobody really would call them out for the menace they brought upon us all and especially the under-privileged.

— How folks have come together to amplify fundraisers online

In the past one month or more, I witnessed many online fundraisers set up to help young people from the DBA (Dalit-Bahujan-Adivasi) community folks with disabilities and the Queer community. These folks are facing the wrath of the pandemic more severely than many others, owing to the disadvantaged situations that they are put in because of their already socially marginalised positions, be it in the household, in the education sector, in the job-market.

Photo : https://twitter.com/squineon

FUNDRAISERS TO THE RESCUE

The state policies have remained ignorant towards catering to the vulnerable communities in this time, visibly.

Besides, the online community is constantly faced with the algorithm hurdle that keeps barricading these important fundraiser posts from reaching the right audience and in the right amount, in the given deadline to raise the set amount for these causes. So to overcome this barrier, a set of phenomena was witnessed that uses spamming as a way to increase reach for fundraisers.

COMMENTS FOR REACH

Spamming on the comments of the Instagram fundraiser posts, endlessly tagging IG users on comment box took a serious turn when the online community took it upon themselves to help these people in need.

Across the popular platforms for amplifying fundraisers, people have been seen tagging many online users that are influential student political figures, lifestyle vloggers, organizations or groups, collectives and online help forums on Twitter and Instagram or Facebook.

Usually avoided, users are not hesitating even to go as far as to text people personally to amplify and donate for the fund collection. This would have been rather counter-productive in usual circumstances. But in the ongoing time, it is what suffices.

— wave II of COVID in India

As we move onto a second wave of the pandemic, the third world problems of India that were conveniently suppressed for generations are slowly unfolding themselves and privileges are being counted up as it becomes harder to un-see the grim face of a system that had been operating in a collapsed state for years —

— only that it has now failed to keep its skeletons hidden in the closet.

Faces of the second wave includes a society of those people who are admitted in facilities where they are forced to share a bed with another infected patient.

A group of people, mostly from the middle-class seem to be putting more faith in their many gods instead of the healthcare system.

Is religion all that they can afford in order to cope with a crisis?

Or is it a privilege that the poor and the oppressed hardly would dare lean on to?

And while an elite section of Indian society would barely go out on rallies or to the polling stations amidst a wave of pandemic, the middle-class and the marginalised communities still seem to lean on to political promises for a better year ahead.

They still say, pandemic does not discriminate on caste, class and religious lines.

A class of migrants have failed to be able to afford going back home by flights, like many of us who come from relatively developed spaces. They walk kilometers, they will do that again.

Dying respectfully has become a concept far too expensive, living takes lesser traumas it seems. One sphere where our religious beliefs have ceased to prevail now is death as all of our bodies go on to be diminished to ashes by strangers, unaccompanied of any rituals or saints.

To think that we finally reached a stage as extreme as borrowing in this pandemic, to help each other breathe some cylinders of decent oxygen while our climate degrades every hour with the used masks being disposed carelessly in the landmines and the waterbodies.

Education system has hit the lower rungs of our society way harder than imaginable to us. The sudden switch to online education had hardly been processed by young students and now it looks like they may as well learn to thrive in this setup for a good long year.

The future may seem way more grim. Maybe it will be. Maybe not. Till then, keep voting. Vaccines may reach to us sooner.