Amir Ullah Khan
Hyderabad: The new virus that started killing people around Christmas in China, then in Iran and Europe in January and February and now in the rest of world, has caused an unprecedented lockdown across the modern word. New York, San Francisco, London, Madrid, Rome and Hyderabad are all ghost towns now, with all manufacturing, construction, transportation and tourism sectors having come to a grinding halt. Millions of people are without any work, while a few are trying to work from Home.
Economic impact of viral attack
In this series, we will try to examine the economic impact of the viral attack. In many ways, this is among the most difficult things to do, as we have no precedence to go by. We do not know how long this lockdown will last. Some dire predictions even say that this situation could go on for one entire year. What we certainly know is that this epidemic has shut down all education institutions. This means that 260 million children in schools and about 30 million in college have their education interrupted. Most of them have little or no access to any resource that will allow them to continue to learn.
These large numbers now do not have access to the security, space and the infrastructure that will allow them to study. Their parents, many of whom have their work disrupted will not be in any position to help their children while at home. Faculty lack the capability of keeping their students engaged through virtual and e-learning mechanisms. This enormous disruption that we are witnessing will result in large scale losses. These millions of students will end up losing months of learning and when they are back in school or college, their institutions will be burdened with the costs of bringing these students back on track.
There is also another major cause for concern. Millions of students depend on anganwadis, crèches, schools and madrasas for their daily food and in some cases, shelter. With these institutions closing or suspending operations, the looming food crisis is in some sense bigger than that of continuous education. Students who haven’t been able to reach home because of travel bans, are staying in hostels and paying guest accommodation that lack the capacity to take care of their residents in times like these.
Impact on education
What would be the cost to the economy simply on account of education institutions closing down? Let us only focus on Telangana. Nearly a million students, in intermediate first and second years, are stranded. There are at least half million students in college, unable to take their exams this year. The delay and uncertainty among these 1.5 million students will itself cost the economy at least 30 billion rupees, that is about 3000 crores rupees. This does not include the cost that the state will incur due to the disruption among the 2.1million school going children. The calculation also does not include the enormous costs that the 4000 foreign students studying here. The total loss therefore could be in excess of 10000 crores.
If we now look at the entire country, the loss in the education sector alone is well above one lakh crores. That is a little more than the annual budget for education by the Union government for the education sector. It is a phenomenal loss, just by way of the impact on the fiscal situation. Even if all goes well, and optimistically the COVID 19 situation is surmounted and put behind us soon, the education sector will take a long while to recover. It will need tremendous support from the state, especially for the poor and the vulnerable. The tragedy is that we have no idea how we are going to do this. The silver lining however, is that this might just give us an opportunity to completely overhaul the system, make it more flexible, bring in technology aids, allow flexibility in exams and evaluations and train our teachers better.
Ami Ullah Khan is Professor of Economics at MCRHRDI and visiting faculty at ISB and NALSAR