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Schools shift to online teaching during heat waves or pollution. Poor children suffer, as they cannot access instruction.

India’s education policy today rightly emphasises better learning outcomes, equitable and inclusive education, and the human capital required to achieve the country’s developmental goals. But for millions of children, the basic condition that makes all of this possible – uninterrupted schooling- is increasingly becoming a challenge.

This is different from school dropout, which is usually seen as the primary cause of learning disruption. The reasons for dropout are many in India, like poverty or social factors like child marriage and gender roles prioritising boys’ education, leaving girls to perform domestic chores, etc. This is particularly seen at the secondary level, where dropout rates are substantially higher than in primary schooling, and retention remains a challenge despite higher enrolment.

Environmental factors

Added to this is the problem of disruptions in schooling, mostly due to environmental factors, the COVID-19 pandemic being the exception in recent times. In recent years, schools in Delhi and across parts of North India have been repeatedly shut down due to severe air pollution. Across the country, schools face similar interruptions at different times of the year due to heatwaves, dense fog, heavy rainfall, cyclones and floods. On April 19, the Odisha government ordered schools in nine districts to remain shut for a few days from April 20 due to a heatwave warning.

For the current summer, IMD has already warned of severe above-normal heatwave days across several parts of the country during the April-June period. Such weather-induced disruptions show that school closures are no longer just a pandemic-era exception. It is becoming a recurring feature of educational life at a time of growing extreme climate shocks.

The problem is not only about schools being shut, but that the alternative is far from equal. For many children, a shift to online classes is not a smooth substitute for classroom learning, but it is just the beginning of exclusion. The experience of the COVID-19 pandemic provides important evidence of how school closures widen educational inequalities.

Survey findings

Findings from the latest third round of the India Human Development Survey (IHDS-3), conducted in 2022–24, clearly capture this divide. Among children aged 5-15 who were enrolled during the pandemic, 52 per cent of those in private schools were offered online classes during the closure period, compared with only 30 per cent in government schools.

Similarly, 45 per cent of private-school students received educational videos or other online learning material, compared with just 25 per cent of government-school students. Most strikingly, 61 per cent of children in government schools reported that their school shared nothing at all, compared with 43 per cent in private schools. These findings reflect a wider national pattern, with a Ministry of Education report showing that in several large states, between 40 and 70 per cent of school-going children lacked access to digital devices during the pandemic.

Teachers’ accounts from the IHDS-3 survey help explain why this gap was so difficult to bridge. Among Grade 3 teachers, those in government schools were more likely than their private-school counterparts to report barriers such as poor electricity, weak internet access, and lack of devices – constraints that students themselves had to grapple with. They were also more likely to point to limited digital skills among students and parents, as well as home circumstances that hindered learning. Remote education fell short not only due to technological gaps, but also because learning from home was shaped by unequal household circumstances.

Closures do not create a temporary and uniform pause in learning; they produce an unequal shock. Children already studying in less advantaged settings are more likely to lose access to instruction altogether and less likely to recover quickly. Educational disruption, therefore, does not merely interrupt learning in the short term. It can deepen longer-term inequalities in human capital formation.

That is why the challenge goes beyond curriculum, teacher training, and school infrastructure, even though all of these are important. Such discussions often assume that schooling continues without interruption. But when environmental shocks repeatedly push children out of classrooms and into highly unequal home-based learning conditions, the central policy question becomes one of continuity: who can remain connected to learning when the school gates are shut?

E-initiatives

India is not short of digital education initiatives. PM eVIDYA was launched to provide multimodal access to education, while DIKSHA serves as a national platform for digital learning content. Samagra Shiksha has also expanded digital and ICT support within the broader school education framework, and NEP 2020 places clear emphasis on equitable and inclusive education. But the existence of schemes does not by itself guarantee continuity in learning. Where households lack stable connectivity, adequate devices, digital familiarity, or supportive learning environments, the children are unable to benefit from them.

As environmental disruptions become more frequent, measures for continuity in learning can no longer be treated as part of crisis management. They must be built into mainstream education policy through stronger digital access, low-tech alternatives, community-based support, and effective last-mile delivery. Otherwise, every school closure will widen the gap between children who can continue learning and those who cannot, turning such interruptions into inequality.

The writer is an Associate Fellow, NCAER – National Data Innovation Centre. Views expressed are personal.

In a climate where outcome monitoring, scaling up, and sustainability are the main buzzwords, grassroots organisations that speak from the heart are likely to be deprived of resources and public attention

The 21st century saw the emergence of a new philosophy for voluntary organisations. Good intentions were no longer enough, scale and outcome monitoring became the new gold standard. The California consensus, driven by the philanthropic impulses of tech billionaires, impatiently sought rapid societal change rooted in science and technology. This was a departure from the philosophy of institution-building favoured by foundations like Ford and Rockefeller. The traditional idea of selfless service was no longer sufficient; new philanthropists demanded measurable results. Ostensibly, it made sense that recipients of public funding should be held accountable. But what if this search for scale and accountability is ultimately counterproductive?

Microfinance programmes have been praised for high repayment rates in group lending to women by Grameen Bank and BRAC. However, Anne Marie Goetz and Rina Sen Gupta find that pressure on fieldworkers and group members to achieve high repayment rates has led them to selectively choose recipients based on their ability to repay, often excluding the poorest, least educated, and least connected. When outcome measures become the main criteria for judging programmes and institutions, it is not surprising that they lose sight of their original goals and become focused on maximising performance on outcome metrics.

Randomised evaluations, the foundation of rigorous programme assessment, are complex and often methodologically fraught. What happens in one place can influence another. Analysis of the effect of savings groups on income in Uganda and Malawi by Christopher Heitzig and Rossa O’Keeffe-O’Donovan finds that rising incomes in villages that implemented savings groups also impacted nearby villages. As a result, about 23-28 per cent of the programme’s benefits were not captured. Without careful attention to spillover effects, we might wrongly conclude that a programme has failed even when it has succeeded.

A focus on scale introduces other challenges. Transformative social programmes are often bottom-up, emphasising processes that need participation and buy-in from local communities. They may not be easily scaled, and the idea that a programme is only valuable if it can reach hundreds of millions of people might be counterproductive. In their book, John List and colleagues enumerate examples of projects that fail to scale globally. Closer to home, consider Lok Jumbish, a primary education programme in Rajasthan. Lok Jumbish was a highly participatory programme in which the community was mobilised to create a village education plan. It was so successful that the World Bank and the Indian government collaborated to scale up some of these ideas into a larger District Primary Education Programme (DPEP) that eventually covered 272 districts and 18 states as a centrally sponsored scheme.

A comparison of Lok Jumbish and DPEP by Tomako Kobayashi highlights their differences and notes the shallow local participation in Village Education Committees of DPEP compared to the deep, passionate engagement in Lok Jumbish. Evaluation of DPEP by the World Bank shows that while the programme was successful in increasing initial enrolment, it did not achieve its goal of reducing dropout rates or improving learning achievement.

Arguably, the most significant critique of the California consensus — which has now entered the vocabulary of Indian philanthropy and policymaking — is that it has shifted the landscape of civil society activism from passion and commitment to technocracy. In a climate where outcome monitoring, scaling up, and sustainability are the main buzzwords, grassroots organisations that speak from the heart are likely to be deprived of resources and public attention.

India is home to some of the greatest transformative movements — Satyagraha and non-violence, land reform, dairy cooperatives, the Chipko Movement — all rooted in grassroots civic action. Each was a leap of faith, each generated energy that gave rise to a nation of a thousand movements. Let us not allow the space for civic action to shrink in the pursuit of the holy grail of outcome monitoring.

The writer is professor, NCAER-National Data Innovation Centre and University of Maryland. Views are personal

Schemes to raise women’s workforce participation will come a cropper unless men actively take part in domestic work.

Even as policy efforts are being oriented towards ‘Viksit Bharat 2047’through women-led development, a large chunk of women in India remains absent from paid employment, a reality that undermines both gender equality and economic growth. Over the past two decades, some initiatives like skill development programmes, entrepreneurship support, investment in child care, and flexible work arrangements have sought to raise women’s participation in paid employment. Yet, these measures have not yielded the desired results.

Currently, only about a third of Indian women participate in the labour force, far below most developed economies and roughly half of the levels in Scandinavian countries. It is even lower than several lower-middle-income countries like Bangladesh. This persistent gap reflects a deeper, structural inequity. Women are encouraged to enter paid employment without a corresponding reduction in their unpaid domestic and care work that consumes much of their day. Without addressing this imbalance, the gains from these policies will remain limited.

Data points

The National Statistical Office’s Time Use Survey (2024) makes this im-balance visible. Among young adults aged 15–29 years, women spend over five hours a day on unpaid domestic and care work, while men spend just half an hour. Absence of women from the labour market, therefore, often reflects not inactivity but their engagement in unpaid work. Men, meanwhile, devote roughly four and a half hours daily to paid employment. In contrast, Scandinavian countries, where domestic work is shared more evenly with men spending three or more hours a day on housework, consistently record higher and more stable female labour force participation.

Policy debates on women’s employment often focus on labour-market and public-sphere barriers – limited job availability, safety and mobility concerns, and mismatches between education, skills, and job opportunities. These constraints are indeed real and deserve attention. But ad-dressing them in isolation assumes that women can endlessly stretch their time to combine the existing domestic and care burden with paid work. For most women, most of the day is already earmarked for unpaid domestic and care work. Policies centred solely on employability or job creation ask women to squeeze in paid work into days that are already full, resulting in time poverty.

Unsurprisingly, many respond by opting out of the workforce or cluster-ing in home-based, informal, or part-time jobs that accommodate domestic responsibilities but offer limited security or advancement. When unpaid work remains unequally distributed within households, investments in skills, childcare, and employment generation struggle to trans-late into sustained workforce participation.

Sharing domestic work

The picture would change only when men share domestic responsibilities more equally; women would then gain the time and energy to effectively engage in paid work, amplifying the impact of labour-market interventions. But the issue is far more complex than what it appears to be.

This unequal allocation of domestic and care work does not emerge overnight. It is shaped early in life through gender socialisation. Girls spend their formative years learning household responsibilities, care giving, and emotional labour, while boys are more likely to invest time in market-oriented skills -uninterrupted study, sports, networking, and training. These early differences shape confidence, mobility, and expectations around work. By the time young adults enter the labour market, many women are already burdened with substantial unpaid household and care work that constrains their choices.

Change in culture

A life-cycle approach is therefore essential. It requires a fresh look at gendered division of labour and since it is learned early, it must also be addressed early. Life-skill education should explicitly include household and care work for both boys and girls, recognising cooking, cleaning, and care giving as essential skills for everyday life rather than women’s responsibilities alone. Embedding these skills within school curricula can help normalise men’s participation in domestic work long before adult-hood. Public investment must also extend beyond childcare to a broader care infrastructure to include even the elderly.

While schemes such as ‘Palna’ have strengthened crèche facilities, their reach remains too limited. As India’s population ages, need for elderly care will further intensify women’s unpaid care work burden unless it is addressed through expanded public and community-based services.

Importantly, this is not merely a cultural argument but an economic one. Countries that have successfully narrowed gender gaps in employment, particularly Scandinavian nations, had combined labour-market reforms with policies that actively encourage men’s engagement in care work through parental leave, workplace norms, and sustained public messaging that frames domestic responsibility as shared work. India’s own time-use data now provides the empirical foundation to pursue a similar, evidence-based conversation more honestly.

As India aspires to harness its demographic dividend and accelerate inclusive growth, it must confront a simple reality: half of its population -women – cannot join paid employment on equal terms with men unless unpaid domestic work is redistributed. Promoting men’s participation at home is neither radical nor symbolic. It is a pragmatic policy lever,one that recognizes housework and care as essential work and treats women’s time as finite and valuable. Unless the unequal distribution of unpaid work within households is addressed, India’s full economic potential cannot be unleashed.

The writer is an Associate Fellow at the National Data Innovation Centre (NDIC), NCAER. Views are personal.