With no outlook on when the institutions will open, should the admission process even start?

St Stephen’s College, one of Delhi University’s top institutions, has been known for its strict admission process for years. Instead of solely choosing its next intake of students on the basis of marks obtained, it also conducts personal interviews in order to make the final selection. The college usually shortlists five to seven candidates for every seat and those who have endured the process will tell you that it is a gruelling personal examination. While the college has every reason to conduct the interview — giving some candidates who might have faltered a little bit in the board exams a shot at making it — one wonders whether conducting virtual interviews in the wake of the pandemic makes any sense this year. Some teachers have argued that conducting online video interviews will be potentially unfair to those students without high-bandwidth data connections. This indeed is an issue. In fact, a much deeper one that policy-makers in the education sector will need to come to terms with in a post-COVID world. The pandemic has already undone years of economic progress made by millions of Indians to rise out of poverty. It should not be allowed to make the educational gap between rich and poor Indians even wider. Online learning is a good solution but all stakeholders, not just educators and the Government but also telecom companies and hardware makers, should try to devise solutions to ensure that this gap does not grow.

However, will it make sense to start the interview process when there is no clarity as to how the educational boards will issue results? Further, there’s no clarity about when colleges will reopen. Even optimistic projections for educational institutions of all sorts reopening are predicting that this will not happen till September. The opening of schools and colleges will be a sure sign that things have returned to a sense of normalcy. But the truth is that the pandemic is still wreaking havoc on India’s healthcare system, particularly in bigger cities. And while Governments have managed to tame the dragon for now, a hasty reopening, coupled with social distancing and hygiene norms not being followed, could make matters worse. It might make sense for St Stephen’s and the rest of Delhi University to wait until there is some more clarity.