Digital Education During COVID-19 in Odisha: Challenges and Prospects

Introduction

The newly detected corona virus pandemic has become a global health crisis and is moving like a wave to every continent except Antarctica. It was declared as a pandemic by the World Health Organization on 11^th March 2020 to take immediate actions to detect, treat and reduce transmission to save people's lives. More than 10,474,029 cases of Covid-19 have been found over 215 countries and territories, resulting in around 5,09,000 deaths and over 57,16,000 recoveries as on June 2020. In 2021 we are living with the second wave of the corona pandemic with the fear of third wave in the coming future. More than 203,944,144cases of Covid-19 have been found over 215 countries and territories, resulting in around 4,312,902 deaths and a total of 4,394,596,684 vaccine doses have been administered as August 2021. But Covid-19 is not merely a health crisis with the potential to create devastating social, economic and political crises in both developed and developing countries (Nicola et al., 2020). The United Nation’s framework for immediate socio-economic crisis said that “The Covid-19 pandemic is far more than a health crisis affecting societies and economies at their core. It will most likely to increase unemployment, poverty and inequalities at a global scale making achievement of Sustainable Development Goals even more urgent” (UN Sustainable Development Group, 2020, pg. 03). The widespread transmission of the covid-19 pandemic put challenges for the economic development of the almost all economies of the world but the worst hit in terms of achieving the sustainable development goals specifically for developing countries. One of the major challenges for achieving SDGs are poverty and hunger because this pandemic situation first time rise the extreme poverty level in 2020 where additional around 124 million people were pushed back to poverty (United Nations Sustainable Development Goal Report, 2021). Along with poverty covid-19 pandemic also adversely affected the progress in health and reduced the life expectancy. Around 90% of the nations are still facing the disruption in one or more essential health services. This emergency situations and urgent needs of medical services creates shortage in the supply of doctors, nurses and other health workers. Universal access to quality education is one of the major key for ensuring human development, eradication of poverty and increasing standard of living. According to United Nations Sustainable Development Goal Report, 2021 around 260 million are still out of school globally in 2018 and covid -19 pandemic adds fuel to the fire again. In 2020, due to severe outbreak of the virus there was temporary school closure in almost all countries which impacted around 91% of the students worldwide. Based on UN report, nearly 369 million children who rely on school meals faced problem for searching other sources of daily nutrition requirements.