Undoing of social progress: Covid-19 is intensifying fault lines in society

The pandemic is bringing back caste biases and reversing the gains in girl child education, writes Kavita Chowdhury

Pallab Sengupta, a government school teacher in Mograhaat in West Bengal’s South 24 Parganas district, is worried about the future of his students. A majority of them are children of agricultural labourers and migrant workers who have been hit the hardest by the lockdown.
 

He has been receiving reports from his  students, mainly girls, that their families might not send them back to school. Some are likely to be forced into joining their families’ full-time embroidery work to support their parents.
 

“Our primary concern is that there will be a significant number of dropouts from school,” says Sengupta. It had not been easy to get these children, especially the girls, enrolled in school in the first place.
 

What is cause for a bigger worry for Sengupta is that “with families caught in financial hardship, trafficking is sure to rise.” The district (South 24 Parganas) is a hotspot of trafficking of girls into commercial sex trade. Child marriage, too, is not uncommon in the area. “By the time the girls are adolescents, the families see them fit for marriage. I fear things are going to get worse now,” he says. He has already alerted the authorities of two cases of child marriage in the midst of the lockdown.
 

Experts concur the lockdown threatens devastating setbacks for the social development sector— be it in the sphere of school attendance or the increase in girl child education, eradication of bonded labour, minimising incidence of child labour, gains in maternal and child health or removing the scourge of untouchability.

“A visible fallout of the financial hardship faced by lower income families will be seen in the education sector,” says Rukmini Banerji, CEO, Pratham Education Foundation, which assesses countrywide learning levels with its Annual Status of Education Report. “The first casualty will be the girl students. It is they who will be pulled out of schools, more so if they have weak learning levels,” she adds.
 

A visible benefit of the Right to Education, says Banerji, was the high retention up to Class 8.  “After this crisis, the danger of dropouts is most in the upper primary level between Classes 6 and 8.”
 

Banerji is worried in such a scenario the related advantages of girl child enrolment, such as delayed marriage and motherhood, would be lost.
 

“We have seen that child marriage in many cases is a pretext for trafficking, with the girl being sold soon after by the husband. The marriage in a way provides a convenient social sanction,” says Rishi Kant of Shakti Vahini, an organisation that works to combat trafficking of women. He regrets the lockdown is undoing the progress made in curbing trafficking of minors. “There is no other way but to restart our work and ensure that traffickers cannot poach on poor families,” says Kant.
 

For parents, the choices before them are equally stark. With their work having come to a grinding halt, they have no option but to give up on the education of their children.
 

Oinam Rajen, a fisherman whose livelihood is dependent on the daily fish catch at Loktak Lake in Manipur, the largest fresh water lake in the Northeast, says, “We are down to the last morsel of rice. It’s been 50 days and we have not been able to earn anything as the markets are shut. We have also not received any help or relief.”
 

Rajen confesses he might not be able to send his children back to school. “The future of our children will be destroyed and we are helpless. Since there are no schools nearby, my children stay with my relatives in the town and go to school there. I can’t sustain that any longer,” he says.

Some fishermen are contemplating sending their children to work. “The dam on the Loktak Lake had already made fishing difficult, and now it (lockdown) has made it grim,” says Rajen.
 

Experts fear child labour could become more rampant after the lockdown without government intervention. Many children, who were employed illegally in sweat shops, bangle making units, brick kilns and in agriculture, were abandoned by their employers with no money and food immediately after the announcement of the lockdown and help is still to reach them.
 

Child rights activist Bharti Ali, executive director of HAQ Centre for Child Rights, says, “Governments have to address the migrant labour problem and within that prioritise the issue of the migrant child labour.”
 

HAQ, along with the Pro Child Network, has written to the prime minister to prioritise the issue of the migrant child labour.

Commenting on the long term impact of the lockdown, social and political activist Yogendra Yadav says, “With this income shock, a significant number of people would be pushed into poverty. So, the gains we have made in the past few decades in poverty eradication could be wiped out.”
 

He projects that the fall in income levels and increasing unemployment will be felt most acutely in the health sector, with people not being able to afford basic medical care.
 

Yadav says social-distancing norms could also become an excuse to reinforce untouchability, practised by the upper castes against the lower castes. “In times of stress, coupled with scarcity, there is a scramble for resources, which intensifies fault lines in society — be it between the rich and poor, Hindus and Muslims or upper caste and Dalits.”
 

Such biases are already slowly creeping in smaller towns and villages with people treating the poor as a source of infection and summarily dismissing their domestic helps.
 

Gudiya, a domestic help in Patna, who belongs to the Scheduled Castes  community, says, “After the lockdown, fearing infection all these households have stopped calling me for work. They don’t let us even come near their houses, they treat us like untouchables.”
 

Social development activist John Peter Nelson of Indo-Global Social Service Society, which works with marginalised communities, says, “What the pandemic has reinforced is the age-old class and caste divide. Over the past 73 years since Independence, there had been successes in bridging these gaps to some extent, but the corona lockdown has pushed us back considerably.”