Education in India: Covid-19 pandemic's lessons not learnt, shows data

In 2020, when schools were closed, ASER found that barely one-third of all enrolled children were receiving learning material and activities from their schools (35.6 per cent)

The Annual Status of Education Reports (ASERs) have become a defining standard for the status of school education in India.

ASER 2021 covers, by and large, the Covid-19 period when children were largely out of school. On the positive side, ASER 2021 shows that families have not lost their faith in education.

Covid-19 notwithstanding, school enrolments have not suffered much, although enrolment patterns have shifted. Even today, only 4.6 per cent children in the age group 6-14 years are not currently enrolled. Among enrolled children, across all school grades, almost 92 per cent of children have textbooks for their current