After refuting Bill Gates’ HIV-AIDS projections for India, HRD Minister Murli Manohar Joshi today tore into the UNESCO report that said the country is at a serious risk of ‘‘not achieving the goals’’ of primary enrolment, adult literacy and gender disparity.Joshi’s 14-page address at the Education for All (EFA) group meeting in Abuja, Nigeria, was devoted to refuting the UNESCO report on India’s education scenario, point by point. This is the second time that Joshi has contested an HR report prepared by a UN body. The last time it was the UNDP that had given a poor position to India in their Human Index Report, 2002. Joshi had said it had not taken into account the country’s happiness and spiritual index.Disagreeing with the method used to divide countries into different groups to arrive at conclusions, Joshi said (about the UNESCO report): ‘‘First, only three parameters have been considered to deduce the performance of countries under EFA. Secondly, reliance is only on the historical data of 1991 and 2000 to come to drastic conclusions on the probability of a country to achieve any of the goals.’’He said India will soon spend 6 per cent of GDP on education, an unprecedented amount that would definitely alter the picture captured in the report. To pep up his arguments, he quoted from Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen’s book India: Development and Participation, which says there has been significant progress in the 90s and there are signs of improvement in literacy rate.
