The agony of not learning.

"Schools in India have been shut since March 2020. None of the substitute measures -- online classes, mohalla classes, home-based work -- has been able to compensate for even a fraction of this lost year of schooling for the overwhelming majority of India's children," wrote Anurag Behar. Children have been promoted to higher classes without tests. Class five children have been promoted to Class six, which means that teachers will be expected "to teach them the class-six syllabus, ignoring the reality of their not having learnt anything of class five and having forgotten a lot of their earlier learning. This will be done with all classes." "Almost every school-teacher is horrified by such decisions, while the state leadership seems deliberately disconnected from reality." Instead, in February, "The University Grants Commission (UGC) has asked all universities to 'encourage' students to enrol for the Kamdhenu Gau-Vigyan (cow-science) Exam." The exam was to be "conducted in four categories -- primary level (up to Class 8), secondary level (Class 9-12), college level (after Class 12) and for general public", The Indian Express (TIE). In 2019, Dr Vallabh Kathiria was appointed chairman of National Cow Commission and "With the BJP back in power with a resounding majority, the commission has been allotted a budget of Rs 500 crore (Rs 5 billion) this year," Scroll.in. Cows are big business. "Other than cow-dung CNG pumps for vehicles, it has proposed bull semen banks and cow tourism in a list of creative ideas for what it calls 'cow entrepreneurship'," Mint. "India's universities have produced chief executive officers at companies from Microsoft Corp to Google -- now Prime Minister Narendra Modi thinks they can be even better with competition with global names like Yale, Oxford and Stanford," Bloomberg. A survey of 60,000 school students across India by the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2020 showed that, "Only about one-third of the surveyed children had access to online learning; only 11 percent had access to live online classes," TIE. From kindergarten to Harvard in one giant leap. "Nobel laureate Abhijit Banerjee says that India needs to focus on undoing the widening gap of inequality in education cause by the pandemic as soon as possible," Business Today. "In India, as many as 320 million children have been affected by the school closure because of the pandemic," said Banerjee. Politicians and civil servants learn quickly. The Delhi government has banned private schools from taking online classes during summer vacations. If students of government schools are not getting lessons then students of private schools should not be allowed to get ahead. Official equality. Last year, the Gujarat government would not allow private schools to charge fees for online teaching. Government school teachers are assured their salaries from taxpayers' money but private schools would not be able to pay their teachers if they cannot charge fees. "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 the most dire in the world," The Print. A few may escape. "The village straddles two states. Each state has its own government primary school in its part of the village," wrote Anurag Behar. But all the children of the village are being taught in the open by teachers of one state who face abuse from the teachers of the other state. Maybe, just maybe, some children will escape the cow economy. Why people still have children in India is a mystery.