Shillong, Nov 18: The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) (Rural) of the calendar year 2021 was released on Wednesday via an online event. This is the sixteenth annual report.

Every year from 2005 to 2014, and then every alternate year till 2018, ASER has reported on the schooling status of children in the 5-16 age group across rural India and their ability to do basic reading and arithmetic tasks.

The report for this year states: “Last year, COVID-19 interrupted this trajectory, along with so much else. But with schools being closed since March 2020, understanding the effect of the pandemic on schools, families and children was crucial. To address the need for large scale nationally representative data on the impact of the pandemic on children’s education, in 2020, ASER developed an entirely new design, consisting of a phone-based survey that explored children’s access to learning opportunities.”

With the pandemic extending into yet another year, field-based survey operations were still not possible on a national scale. As a consequence, ASER 2021 followed the same format of a phone-based survey.

Conducted in September-October 2021, eighteen months after the first lockdown, the survey explores how children in the age group of 5-16 studied at home since the onset of the pandemic and the challenges that the schools and households now face as schools reopen across states.

ASER Associate, Meghalaya, Kevin D Sawian said, “The pandemic has affected both students and teachers because they have a lot of catching up to do, especially in the rural areas where the network connectivity is very poor which leads to disruption of online classes… another setback is the non-availability of smartphones for children to use in attending these online classes”.

“Both teachers and students are finding it difficult to adapt to online teaching and studying.” Sawian added.

Highlights of ASER 2021

ASER 2021 was conducted in 25 states and 3 Union Territories. It reached a total of 76,706 households and 75,234 children in the age group of 5-16 years, as well as teachers or head teachers from 7,299 government schools offering primary grades.

Here are some important findings from the ASER 2021 report in Meghalaya:

-In Meghalaya there is an improvement in children aged 6-14 not enrolled in school as it has dropped from 4.4% in 2018 to 2.5% in 2021.

-The numbers of students in Meghalaya taking tuition slightly increase from 20.3% in 2018 to 21.7% in 2021.

-In Meghalaya availability of smartphones for students in both public and private schools have increased; there is an increase from 41.3% in 2018 to 77.9% in 2021. The availability of smartphones for students in the state at home is 77.9% in 2021 but 30.7% have no access to it.

-10.2% of govt schools and 25.4% of private school students in the state had online classes.

-Almost all enrolled children have textbooks for their current grade in Meghalaya. 98.6% of children enrolled in both government and private schools have their textbooks for their current grade.