Editorial

When the January 2021 issue of the Contemporary Education Dialogue appeared, the pandemic in India seemed somewhat under control, numbers were going down and the rollout of vaccines was being announced. A confident Indian Prime Minister went on to announce at the World Economic Forum that ‘a country that is home to 18% of the world’s population, that country has saved the humanity from a big disaster by containing the Corona effectively’. The disaster was looming and in a couple of months, a second deadlier wave started to sweep the country and has escalated to unimaginable levels, erupting in a national catastrophe. ‘It’s hard to convey the full depth and the range of the trauma, the chaos and the indignity of what people are being subjected to’ writes Arundhati Roy (2021) in an article in The Guardian on 28 April, calling it ‘a crime against humanity’. Across the country,