It will be very dark without the light of education.

"The latest Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), conducted in March this year in rural Karnataka, showed an enormous loss of learning in school children due to closure of schools during the Covid epidemic, Indian Express (TIE). Children have been promoted to higher classes without exams, News18, even though they have not learnt anything since schools have been closed since March last year due to lockdown, india.com, and have forgotten what they knew before that. "A new survey of nearly 1,400 underprivileged school children across fifteen Indian states", showed that after "A year-and-a-half of pandemic-related closures, for instance, have created a four-year learning deficit. A student who was in Grade 3 before Covid-19 is now in Grade 5, and will soon enter middle school, but with reading abilities of Grade 1 pupil," wrote Andy Mukherjee. "India's edtech (online education) industry is poised to become $30 billion in size in the next 10 years, according to a report," Economic Times (ET). "Online education offerings for classes 1to 12 are projected to increase 6.3X by 2022 from the base of 2019," the report said. "The post K-12 market is expected to grow 3.7X to touch $1.8 billion." "Byju's, a startup valued at $16.5 billion, is in early discussions about an initial public offer," Mukherjee. "But the thriving edtech market caters mostly to the needs of the wealthier segments of the population." "The good news is that India's poor haven't given up on education." "Anurag Behar is the Chief Sustainability Officer of Wipro Limited, CEO for Azim Premji Foundation & Vice Chancellor, Azim Premji University," wipro.com. "Online Learning is ineffective because of two reasons. One, most children don't have access to online learning. And second, the inherent nature of learning of children is such that online learning doesn't work, it's ineffective," said Behar in an interview. Then, there are Mohalla classes "which is teachers going into neighborhoods, into villages and conducting classes", "But, Mohalla classes, which you can conduct a couple of hours a day, cannot substitute for eight hours of school six days a week." Behar says, "...this is by far the greatest emergency that's going to face any education system ever. You are going to have 210 million children returning to schools, who have not had education for 17 months, who have forgotten what they knew in March 2020. You, in fact, do not know how many of those kids are going to drop out." Prof Jean Dreze, born in Belgium, got his PhD in Economics from Indian Statistical Institute in New Delhi, has lived in India since 1979 and became a citizen of our country in 2002, wikipedia. Recently he studied learning ability in Dalit children in a village in Jharkhand, BBC. "It was shocking to find that out of 36 children enrolled at the primary level, 30 were not able to read a single word," Mr Dreze said. "Once you are able to read and write and you have reached higher levels, then you could fall behind a little bit but you'd still be able to continue progressing," "But if you've not learnt the basics and you are now left behind because you have been promoted to the next class, and you are actually below that, then it is as good as dropping out." "The parliamentary committee on education must be congratulated," wrote Prof Sukanta Choudhuri. "I admits some home truths: Some 24 crore (240 million) children have missed school for over a year; 77% of children have no access to online education; In any case, 'Online education is not real education'; Dropouts have increased at secondary level." "As with our economy, our education system was already in decline before Covid-19. The two sectors are linked: Reversing all precedent, there are more dropouts among boys than girls. Boys are abandoning school to earn a living -- sometimes, after Covid, as their family's chief breadwinner." "With classrooms shut and parents losing their jobs in the pandemic, thousands of families are putting their children to work to get by, undoing decades of progress in curbing child labour and threatening the future of a generation of India's children," Hindustan Times. No education is darkness of the mind. Which makes India's future dark. Very dark.