India rubbishes Unesco's global report on education

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TIMES NEWS NETWORK[ THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 2005 12:41:23 AM]

DELHI: UNESCO’s Education for All Global Monitoring Report ’06 may hold countries like India responsible for failure to meet the ’15 goal of universal primary education and gender parity, but the government isn’t buying the story. Instead, the government finds the report to be based on outdated information. The ’06 report states that India, despite improvement (the EFA Development Index has increased from 0.696 in ’01 to 0.741 in ’02), seems to have found its way into the league of nations presenting an obstacle to the fulfilment of the millennium development goals.

“Three-fourth of the world’s illiterates live in 12 countries — India, China, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Egypt, Brazil, Iran, Morocco and Congo.” The government feels the report is based on outdated information, and thus, does not present a true picture of the improvements made. Speaking at a function organised by the Unesco to release the fourth edition of the report, Kumud Bansal, secretary, elementary education & literacy said, “The EDI rankings are on the basis of data for ’01-02. Several important initiatives have been taken in the country since then including the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, the revised Mid-Day Meal programme, Kasturba Gandhi Ballika Vidyalaya scheme, etc that would have a positive impact on progress towards achieving EFA goals. The EFA development index calculated by the ’06 report takes into account an adult literacy rate of around 60% for India, although this is lower than the rate reported by Census ’01 and the subsequent statistics.”

Interestingly, although India is enumerated as a country that would fail to achieve the Dakar goal of achieving 50% literacy by ’15, as far as prospects for meeting universal primary education targets by ’15 goes, India is not included in any category that is likely to meet any target or not. Mr Bansal said that this was a “major omission” in the report. Other omissions in the report related to gender in curriculum. Mr Bansal said, “The report refers to studies that were carried out in 1984 and 1987 — before the launch of the National Literacy Mission. Reference to outdated material that is more than 20 years old in a report that seeks to measure progress made over the last one year is perhaps not completely relevant.” Mr Bansal said important decisions have been taken in recent years that are likely to impact achievement of EFA goals. These include the imposition of a 2% education cess to provide funds for elementary education, the commitment of the Centre to increase resources up to 6% of GDP and the proposed legislation on free and compulsory.