COVID-19 pandemic: impact and opportunities for education in India

The sudden breakout of COVID-19 has created a major crisis in almost every sector like Travel and Tourism, Entertainment, Sports, Corporates, Financials, Manufacturing, Education, and Service sectors. We cannot identify any sector which remained unaffected by the crisis. The magnitude of the impact may vary from sector to sector. The same happened to the Indian education system. It has faced a worldwide lockdown estimating to impact almost 320 million learners across the country. India has a robust education structure, with a huge chain of more than 1.4 million schools, 799 Universities, 39071 Colleges, and 11923 Stand Alone Institutions as per data available on the sixth report of ‘All India Survey on Higher Education on the web portal, are all affected by the pandemic situation. Our Indian education system was badly impacted due to pandemics, mostly based on traditional or classroom teaching. Though most of the school and colleges, for the benefit of students, had opted for online teaching, yet some of the low income private and government teaching institutes and students from a remote location could not opt to online teaching due to the unavailability of the internet, Laptop, Desktop or Smartphones persistent with a survey by EY-Parthenon.