Treat Teachers also as Frontline Workers

As the second wave of a pandemic continues to haunts the country, the teaching community has also been hit hard. Universities like Delhi University, Mumbai University, Presidency University and many schools and colleges have seen the tragic inter-generational loss of promising young teachers and veteran academics. Schools all across the country are grappling with teachers death. For government school teachers, who are deployed on Covid-19 and in panchayat election duties are more prone to this dangerous virus. In Uttar Pradesh, 700 teachers are estimated to have died of Covid-19 after allegedly contracting it while on duty in recent panchayat elections. For their students, colleagues and families the grief is collective and hard to measure. The loss of vital academicians is grim implications for any possibilities of the education system returning to Normal.

                                  (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5LcagWEmYc)

It has now become vital to include teachers also as frontline workers. One of the many misses in India's vaccination program is not having allowed teachers and school staffs, regardless of their age, to jump the vaccine queue. Many international institutions have called to include teachers also as frontline workers and many countries like Sweden, Canada and France are aligning to this philosophy. The economic shock of the first wave has been a heavy one smaller schools mostly in the semi-urban and rural area, which was already facing a downfall in student enrollment, resulting in many teachers losing jobs and income. As India has learnt the hard way, the pandemic is not likely to fade away soon. The second wave has caused an unprecedented loss of lives and livelihood to many innocent people. As the future waves (3rd and maybe 4th) are inevitable the education system has embraced the difficult disruption from classroom to screen, with no support to teachers who have managed this transition on their own by putting in more working hours. But, as several surveys have shown, the online classroom is an imperfect and iniquitous solution. 

While the society as a whole must learn to acknowledge and recognize its contribution, both state and central government must do more to secure their well being. That would be a wise investment in a shared future.