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