Madhav Chavan on challenges to education in Covid-19, and doable solutions

Undaunted by the challenges the pandemic has posed for education, Chavan offers radical - but doable - solutions to Anjuli Bhargava

There’s nothing conventional about Madhav Chavan. I expect the founder of one of the country’s largest NGOs, Pratham, which focuses on providing quality education to the underprivileged, to rant about how the Covid-19 crisis has disrupted teaching across the country, how it has hurt students who lack access to online learning, how this would widen the gap between rich and poor kids…
 

Instead, he laughs and tells me about a video of a seven- or eight-year-old boy who is trying to recite the table of nine and has clearly forgotten bits of it. At the end of the short clip,