Digital Connectivity and Learning Losses during COVID-19: Evidence from Rural India

We examine how digital connectivity shaped rural children’s educational outcomes during COVID- 19 school disruptions in India. Digital access may mitigate learning losses by enabling continued engagement with remote educational content, but it may also worsen outcomes if greater connectivity increases access to distracting forms of screen-based entertainment. Combining district-level variation in pre-pandemic mobile network infrastructure with learning outcomes for approximately 2.2 million rural children aged 5–16 years from the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), we implement a difference-in-differences design comparing high- and low-connectivity districts before and after the pandemic. Math scores decreased by an additional 0.054 standard deviations and reading scores by 0.048 standard deviations in more connected districts following the pandemic, with these deficits persisting through 2024. The effects are concentrated among adolescents, girls, and students in government schools. Using time-use data from the CMIE Consumer Pyramids Household Survey (CPHS), we find suggestive evidence that children in high-connectivity districts shifted time away from learning toward indoor entertainment, with the entertainment gap widening from approximately 14 minutes per day in the immediate post-pandemic period to 36 minutes per day by 2024. Adults in the same districts also increased time spent on indoor entertainment and, among the employed, on market work, patterns consistent with reduced parental supervision and greater competition for children’s time. Together, the findings suggest that in areas with stronger digital connectivity, increased engagement with non-educational screen activities may have contributed to larger and more persistent learning losses during and after the pandemic.