Dismantling fiefdoms is a difficult task. Ask the Prime Minister who has had to create so many new departments to honour his political commitments. The National Literacy Mission (NLM) which was set up by the late Rajiv Gandhi falls under one such category. It is tempting to think that Human Resource Development (HRD) Minister Murli Manohar Joshi's decision to dismantle the NLM is of a piece with his earlier exertions towards undoing the life-time stranglehold on the Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts, especially since the minister has also appropriated Jawaharlal Nehru as a fellow Allahabad scientific product. But the move to evaluate the NLM is somewhat more far-reaching. Set up in 1988, it had the aim of making 80 million people literate by 1995, which was then changed in 1997 to 100 million in 1999. That deadline has long since expired and only 70 million people have so far been made ``functionally literate''. Now the NLM, which won itself a UNESCO prize earlier this year in a blaze of publicity, has set itself a fresh target of 100 million literate people in a ``time-bound'' manner, a marvellous piece of obfuscatory semantics if ever there was one. This when the Total Literacy Campaign, which is the principal strategy of the NLM, even now exists in only 450 districts of the country.The NLM is only part of an entire department of adult education which Joshi has now ordered to be merged with the elementary education department. The other department will handle secondary education and higher education. The idea is that with greater focus on elementary education (which bags 60 per cent of the education budget every year) the adult education bureau can be phased out. This is not a moment too soon. Though in terms of budgetary allocation, adult education got only Rs 113 crore this year, it is the signals that this decision will send out that are important. The bureau has seen duplication of work in the Directorate of Adult Education and the National Institute of Adult Education, which have been embroiled in prolonged legal battles. It has seen the addition of the National Literary Resource Centre which also services some of the same requirements. That's not all, the Rural Functional Literacy Project has by the Education Department's own admission not had the ``expected impact''.The phenomenon of functional confusion is not restricted to the adult education bureau alone. Take the case of the Education Guarantee Scheme (EGS), which the HRD Minister has borrowed from Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Digvijay Singh and wants to implement at the Centre. There's no word yet whether the Non-Formal Education scheme - which the Planning Commission in its evaluation has said has had only 1 per cent success and which is along the same lines as the EGS - will be scrapped. Take the other example of the Mid-Day Meal Scheme, which has not expanded beyond the dry rations stage in a majority of states. No one wants to turn off the funds tap on that scheme either, though it still costs the exchequer over Rs 1,000 crore a year. Instead of tinkering with the education system by appointing RSS loyalists and altering textbooks, if the minister were to concentrate on removing bureaucratic deadwood, he would have everyone's support.
