Is education in danger of being relegated to the sidelines as an outcome of the pandemic? With jobs uncertain and incomes either spent on more immediate needs or saved for a rainy day, most people seem to have put education on the list of non-essentials.

A report in this paper has numbers that should worry us. India’s gross enrolment ratio for higher than school level education is already abysmal, at 27.4 per cent. Going below that would mean having a large swathe of a generation with just basic literacy. This cannot be the future of a rapidly developing country.