IN my last column I inveighed against the lamentable state of our country’s literacy. What is striking from the international experience is that whenever and wherever basic education was spread, the social and economic benefits have been quite striking and visible. The development strategies followed in recent decades by Japan, the East Asian industrialising tigers, and China laid a firm basis for equitable growth by massive investment in basic education for all. Literacy was fundamental not only to accelerating the economic growth of these countries, but to distributing resources more equitably and thereby to empowering more people.
Foundation of economic success
It is a truism today that economic success everywhere is based on educational success. And literacy is the basic building block of education. It is not just an end in itself: literacy leads to many social benefits, including improvements in standards of hygiene, reduction in infant and child mortality rates, decline in population growth rates, increase in labour productivity, rise in civic consciousness, greater political empowerment and democratisation — and even an improved sense of national unity, as people become more aware than before of the country they belong to and the opportunities beyond their immediate horizons.
Increased participation
Literacy is also a basic component of social cohesion and national identity. The foundations for a conscious and active citizenship are often laid in school. Literacy plays a key role in the building of democracy; as I’ve often argued in this space, Kerala provides a striking example of how higher levels of literacy lead to a more aware and informed public. Adult literacy in Kerala is nearly 100 per cent, compared to the Indian average of 52 per cent. As a result, nearly half of the adult population in Kerala reads a daily newspaper, compared to less than 20 per cent elsewhere in India. One out of every four rural labourers reads a newspaper regularly compared to less than two per cent of agricultural workers in the rest of the country. So literacy leads directly to an improvement in the depth and quality of public opinion, as well as to more active participation of the poor in the democratic process.
Amartya Sen, the polymath Nobel laureate in Economics, has reminded us that “The elimination of ignorance, of illiteracy and of needless inequalities in opportunities [are] objectives that are valued for their own sake. They expand our freedom to lead the lives we have reason to value.” We sometimes forget that in his most famous poem, the other Nobel Prize-winning Bengali, the immortal poet Rabindranath Tagore, implicitly spoke of education as fundamental to his dream for India . It was in a place “where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; where knowledge is free” and “where the mind is led forward … into ever-widening thought and action” that Tagore hoped his India would awake to freedom. Such a mind is, of course, one that can only be developed and shaped by literacy.
But more prosaically, illiteracy must be fought for practical reasons. How are we going to cope with the 21st century, the information age, if half our population cannot sign their name or read a newspaper, let alone use a computer keyboard or surf the Net? Tomorrow’s is the Information Age: the world will be able to tell the rich from the poor not by GNP figures, but by their Internet connections. Illiteracy is a self-imposed handicap in a race we have no choice but to run.
Troubling aspect
But it is also essential to focus on one specific aspect of the literacy challenge in our country today. The saddest aspect of India’s literacy statistics is the disproportionate percentage of women who remain illiterate. Sixty per cent of India’s illiterates are women. Female literacy (43 per cent) was 26 percentage points below the male literacy (69 percent). No society has ever liberated itself economically, politically, or socially without a sound base of educated women. In a column a few years ago, I had spoken of my own two-word mantra to promote development in the world: “educate girls”. I will not repeat those arguments here, except to stress that there is no action proven to do more for the human r ace than the education of the female child. Scholarly studies and research projects have established what common sense might already have told us: that if you educate a boy, you educate a person, but if you educate a girl, you educate a family and benefit an entire community.