Girls Out of School: The Faces Behind the Stark Numbers on School Dropouts

We at The Quint wanted to look into this long-term impact of Covid on girls' education through our video series 'Ladki Hoon Padhna Chahti Hoon – India's Girls Out of School'.

(Photo: Altered by The Quint)

(This article was originally published on 9 May 2022 and has been reposted from The Quint's archives on the occasion of International Literacy Day.)

We have passed the anniversary of the deadly second wave of COVID. While officially 5.42 lakh people lost their lives to the virus in India since 2020, there have been many repercussions of the pandemic.

This episode of 'The Big Story' is not going to be about the headline making news, it's going to be about an issue which is very close to us here at The Quint.

Two years since the onset of Covid, India's schools have almost all reopened, but millions of underprivileged students aren't going to be returning to schools anytime soon.

We at The Quint wanted to look into this long-term impact of Covid on girls' education through our video series: Ladki Hoon Padhna Chahti Hoon – India's Girls Out of School.

If you look at the data, according to UNESCO, almost 1.8 billion students globally have been affected by school closures in the pandemic. Around 320 million of them are in India alone, and of this at least 158 million are female students.

And it's not just this UNESCO data alone. Ever since India started relying on digital classes for school students from 2020, there have been several parallel surveys and analyses to shed light on who have been impacted the most by the school closures during COVID and how. Most of these surveys and data point to the one fact that girls especially from caste and economic minorities have become the bigger casualties of the pandemic.

So we decided to go to the faces behind these numbers and meet the girls whose dreams have been shattered and whose childhoods have been lost. Tune in to The Big Story!