Advertisement
Watch | Aishwarya Reddy’s Suicide and Why the Digital Divide Has Accentuated Educational Hierarchies
This program is about how the widespread insistence on online teaching-learning in what is being called the 'new-normal' must be contested and challenged because it doesn't take into consideration the socio-economic locations of a majority of Indian students who come from economically disadvantaged sections and have no access to regular educational opportunities let alone dedicated technology or the internet for accessing online teaching-learning. It becomes clearly established that an already exclusive/elitist access to education becomes an even distant dream for lakhs of Indian students amid the pandemic giving way to issues such as forceble drop-out, discontinuation of academic pursuit, premature entry into the workforce or being entrapped into child trafficking or being forced into early marriages. The digital-divide is sure to have deep and long-term implications for the domain of education and we have ample evidence to show that it is resulting in suicides, mental anxieties and sheer desperation in students, the latest among such cases being the suicide of an LSR student in Telanagana who didn't get her fellowship money, couldn't afford to buy a smartphone to access her online classes and thus took her own life out of helplessness and a sense of being left out. The coronavirus pandemic has only accentuated and underlined the inherent hierarchies/cleavages and walls of separation within the Indian education system.
