
Started in 2021, this longitudinal study explores the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, the subsequent lockdown of schools and shrinking of educational opportunities on the lives of girls between 14 and 17 years in an unauthorised neighbourhood in Delhi. It is an ethnographic study that centralises the location of the participants in this neighbourhood of nearly 1.5 million people which only has one senior secondary school. Given the preexisting precarities for these girls even before the pandemic, the project argues that the creation of new markets in education during and after covid-19 and the many gendered dimensions of education of girls in India and in neighbourhoods where educational opportunities were limited to begin with severed their life chances. The study shows the new structures of exclusion that were created for these girls and others amid shrinking role of public education that eventually led them to dropout out of schools or negotiate for opportunities in an already unequal educational system.
Interviews with the participants were conducted between 2021 and 2023. In 2023, a working paper series was conceived under the project, titled ‘Pandemic and Education: Contexts of Rupture, Change and Possibilities’. A workshop in Delhi was held in August 2023 with scholars whose ethnographic and empirical works show the manifold impacts of the pandemic on education from different regions in India. A few papers from this workshop will be published in 2025 as part of a special journal edition with Comparative Education Studies.
Yamini has presented findings from this study at various national and international conferences including at University of Regensburg, University of Trier and GHI-London. In 2023, she was awarded a two-month visiting fellowship at Weizenbaum Institute in Berlin to study the growth of digital educational markets in India following the pandemic. She is exploring the various facets of these digital education markets, with focus on educational inequality, to take up as her next project.