Maya and Asha can’t read; can’t multiply. Can they cross learning poverty line?

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A teacher takes a class for the Upper KinderGarten students at a government primary school in Hyderabad on July 5, 2022.

Synopsis
Learning poverty is defined as 10-year-olds being unable to read and understand a simple piece of text. Learning poverty existed even before the pandemic, but the last two years have magnified it. Around half of Indian children of school going age are below the learning poverty line. What are the measures that can be taken to improve this state of affairs?

In 2019, two sisters, 10-year-old Maya and 13-year-old Asha, were students in a small school in Andhra Pradesh. When COVID hit, their school shut down. The COVID outbreak forced the parents of Maya and Asha to migrate to Bengaluru. For the next two years, through 2020 and 2021, the kids could not attend school. Their parents were trying their best to keep the avenue of education open for them and not to put them to work. In 2021, they came to