With social distancing measures also enforced, people have been encouraged to connect with their friends and families digitally, while businesses have had to operate remotely.
While there are numerous success stories of how people and enterprises have adapted to the crisis via technology, less has been said about the virus's effect on education.
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In response, educational institutions across the country have started adopting more digital teaching practices and tools to bridge physical divides, showing signs of a long-anticipated evolution. However, are such measures mere stopgaps introduced in light of the pandemic, or can they be sustained to foster longer-term digital transformation in education?
India has made significant gains in education over the past decade, as the number of out-of-school children has decreased and enrolment at all education levels has risen overall. Covid-19, however, has disrupted this transformation, challenging the patterns and practices of India's education system and impacting the education of nearly 320 million students in the country.
To evolve and emerge stronger, the sector must adopt more innovative approaches that could foster greater paradigm shifts in age-old methods. Social distancing is one factor that has led to compulsory online sessions with more parents warming up to the concept of e-learning.
The digital evolution of education in India may seem inevitable, given that the nation is the world's second-largest internet market. Even before the pandemic, however, India had been experiencing concerning drop-out rates - a result of the disproportionate access to education.
This problem has only grown progressively more serious during the pandemic due to the disparity in internet access. While we typically tend to associate this problem with more remote and poorer communities, less than half of urban households have trouble going online too.
This is not to say that no efforts have been made to bridge the digital divide. State initiatives such as ePathshala, are helping to familiarise excluded communities with e-learning, providing educational online resources for educators as well as children and their parents.
More recently, the government also launched the PM eVIDYA programme as a way to broaden multi-mode access to digital education. The sudden disruptions caused by the pandemic, however, mean that long-term digitalisation efforts need to be supplemented with initiatives designed for the immediate recovery of India's education sector.
Enterprises engaging in India's burgeoning EdTech sector can help bridge this digital divide. The growing internet and smartphone penetration rates in India - coincided with the ongoing pandemic- have created a higher demand for e-learning. As a result, the online education market in the country is projected to grow by over US $14 billion until 2024.
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