COVID-19 and Education in India : Impact on Access, Inclusion and Learning

Written from an interdisciplinary lens, this book presents a nuanced and contextual understanding of how the COVID-19 (re)shapes the education sector in India, a country that got its new education policy at the peak of the pandemic to revamp and restructure its educational landscape.

This volume provides an overview of the multiple effects of the pandemic on education under three thematic sections – learning and opportunity losses in the COVID-19 pandemic; access, inclusivity, and the idea of education in the online pedagogy market; and the neo-liberal agenda of education and the pandemic. It problematises the state’s response to the educational inequality crisis which the pandemic has laid bare. With both theoretical and data evidence, this book outlines the important strategies and plans needed to minimise the long-term cascading effect of the pandemic on human capital development in developing countries, and more specifically in India.

Readers will find this compellingly written volume engaging and interesting as it offers new micro-level insights on the threat of the pandemic on education and outlines a few pragmatic strategies to address them. This book would be useful to students, teachers, researchers, and public policy analysts working in the field of Education, Economics, Psychology, Development Studies, Social Work, Sociology and anyone with an interest in education particularly in crises and emergencies. It would also find a place in the reading basket of policymakers, professionals from government and non-government organizations engaged in looking at education and learning inequalities.