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Journalism of Courage
India has done it again. In its Global Monitoring Report, the UNESCO has ranked the country with 34 others in the lowest category. The report was released in Brasilia tonight.
It means that despite the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, the UNESCO doubts that India would not be able to ensure that every child goes to school by 2015, the target date for UNESCO’s ‘‘education for all’’ goal.
This year, as before, the UNESCO has prepared an EDI index or ‘‘Education For All Development Index’’. India is ranked 105th. But the country can take heart from the rankings of some of its sub-continental neighbours. Bangladesh comes 107th, Nepal 110th and Pakistan 123rd. The number of countries in the UNESCO list totals 127. A number of developed countries where education for all was achieved long ago are not included in the study. A few other developing countries have been omitted because of lack of data or faulty statistics.
What is interesting is that the island nation, Maldives, is ranked 20th in the list. And China, with a larger population than India, takes the respectable 54th rank.
In this year’s report, the UNESCO stresses on quality. The organisation points out that one of the key factors which promotes quality is the early pre-school care. In India, infants and children less than six who have access to early childhood care and education total a very low 29.7 per cent. One of the reasons why India has guaranteed free and compulsory education from the age of six is because it was sure it would not have enough money to provide the more expensive pre-school education.
Similarly, as far as the adult literacy rate goes, the country is lagging way behind not just the developed world but even other populous countries with similar multi-dimensional problems like China.
And UNESCO argues that adult literacy is important because if the grown-ups educate themselves, they will be able to motivate their children all the more. The UNESCO data really paints a grim picture of the adult education scenario in India. Of the 560 million adult illiterates in nine of the most populous countries, India has 34 per cent (more than 180 million). Compare this to China’s 11 per cent.
India may argue that most of this data is 2001-based, that the situation has improved since then. After all the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan was really implemented from 2002-03.
