It's a huge challenge.

 With schools closed due to the epidemic, the Annual Status of Education Report (Rural), or ASER 2000 is conducting a country-wide telephone survey on home schooling in multiple waves, wrote Sudipto Mundle. The results are highly encouraging. "The proportion of children not enrolled in a school has increased only marginally, from 4% to 5.5% between 2018 and 2020." And, "62% of the children now have smartphones at home, a sharp increase from 37% just two years ago in 2018, another 10% have access to smartphones outside homes, eg, from neighbors". India needs to focus on undoing the widening gap of inequality in education caused by the pandemic as soon as possible, said Prof Abhijit Banerjee. Only 25% of Indian households had broadband internet that is suitable for online classes. A phone survey by ASER 2020 of 60,000 students in rural India showed, "Only about one-third of the surveyed children had access to online learning; only 11 percent had access to live online classes" Over 80% of children have the required textbooks, and the proportion is higher in government schools because of free distribution. The disadvantage can be inherited as "children with parents educated till Class X had a markedly better access to learning in these months than the children of parents with fewer years spent in school". "The coronavirus pandemic is forcing India's children out of school and into farms and factories to work, worsening a child-labor problem that was already one of most dire in the world," wrote Shwetha Sunil. "A 2018 study by DHL International GmBH estimated that more than 56 million children were out of school in India -- more than double the combined number across Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam." The government has unveiled a new National Education Policy (NEP) which makes sweeping changes to school and college teaching. However, politics is the biggest obstacle to change in India. "Outside the educational hubs of Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities, it is not professional educationists, but politicians and their supporters who own and run a large segment of private schools and colleges. Thus, NEP is likely to hurt political class the most," wrote Rahul Verma. Poor students are unsuspecting victims being "defrauded by a nexus of middlemen, bank staff, school authorities, and state government employees to siphon off money from the Pre-Matric scholarship initiative under the Union Ministry of Minority Affairs." When Samajwadi Party distributed free laptops in 2012 many students sold them off because they could not afford broadband charges or because of a lack of reliable electricity supplies. Must educate every child if India is to become a rich country. But how?