I missed a whole month of online lectures,” says Sumit Kushwaha, a Class X Hindi medium student of Guru Nanak Higher Secondary School, Sion. A few weeks after the Coronavirus-induced lockdown was announced on March 23 last year, Kushwaha’s family vacated their one-room home in Wadala. There were talks that Mumbai schools would remain shut for a short while. His father, who is employed as a driver at a cab aggregator company, decided they would head back to their village in Uttar Pradesh. By June last year, the new academic year had begun. “The unplanned move to online learning caught me off guard. There was little or no Internet connectivity in the village. I ended up losing more than one month of learning,” adds Kushwaha, who has consistently been a topper. 

Dahisar resident Aarush Bhosle would understand Kushwaha’s predicament because some of his classmates have been struggling with online learning, too. “My parents are engineers, so, they offered me necessary tech help needed, but I have seen batchmates who could barely keep up. About 35 per cent of the syllabus had been reduced, so I was relieved, and for the longest time I was hoping that board exams aren’t held,” says the Class X student of Poorna Prajna School, who had a laptop and smartphone to navigate the new style of education. However, the 15-year-old admits that subjects he has proclivity for—science, mathematics—were challenging to crack online. “When a teacher writes differential equations, applied statistics and diagrams on the board, the intricate concepts become easy to understand. This, however, is not possible in a Google classroom. I began to worry that even a topper like myself might flunk.”