OF all the many paradoxes with which our country abounds, the saddest must be that we are a country where nearly half the population is illiterate but which has produced the world’s second largest pool of trained scientists and engineers. A country which invents more sophisticated software for U.S. computer manufacturers than any other country in the world, and yet in which there are at least 35 million children who have not seen the inside of a school.
Cause for concern
For those who care about illiteracy, India is the largest country in a subcontinent that gives great cause for concern. South Asia has emerged as the poorest, the most illiterate, the most malnourished, and the least gender-sensitive region in the world, with over half the world’s illiterate adults and 40 per cent of the world’s out-of-school children. South Asia has by now the lowest adult literacy rate (49 per cent) in the world. It has fallen behind Sub-Saharan Africa (at 57 per cent), even though in 1970 South Asia was ahead. Thirty-seven per cent of all Indian primary school children drop out before reaching the 5th grade. We have a shortage of schools and a shortage of teachers, and the problem gets worse every year because of population growth. Our subcontinent has the worst teacher-pupil ratio in the world. The illiterate population of India exceeds the total combined population of the North American continent and Japan.
India has made only uneven progress in educating its population. Whereas most districts in Kerala, following the introduction of free and compulsory education by an elected Communist government in 1957, have attained 100 per cent literacy, the national literacy level still hovers around the halfway mark; the current figure is 52 per cent. Kerala has a literacy rate of nearly 100 per cent while Bihar is only at 44 per cent. And Bihar has a female literacy rate of only 29 per cent.
The traditional explanation for the failure to attain mass education is two-pronged: the lack of resources to cope with the dramatic growth in population (we would need to build a new school every day for the next 10 years just to educate the children already born) and the tendency of families to take their children out of school early to serve as breadwinners or at least as help at home or on the farm. Thus, though universal primary education is available in theory, fewer than half of India’s children between the ages of six and 14 attend school at all.
Slow progress
But official national policy is undoubtedly in favour of promoting literacy. As a child at school I remember being exhorted to impart the alphabet to our servants under the Gandhian “each one teach one” programme; and many of us were brought up on Swami Vivekananda’s writings about the importance of education for the poor as the key to their uplift. But it is true that, 59 years after Independence, progress has been inexcusably slow, and that Indian politicians are all too quick, as Mrs. Indira Gandhi once was, to take refuge in sharp rejoinders about not drawing the wrong conclusions from the illiteracy figures. Education, Mrs. Gandhi would often say, was not always relevant to the real lives of village Indians, but India’s illiterates were still smart, and illiteracy was not a reflection of their intelligence or shrewdness (which they demonstrated, of course, by voting for her). Fair enough, but Kerala’s literate villagers are smart too.
Silver linings
Now there has been good news. The adult literacy rate has more than tripled since 1951, from 18 per cent in 1951 to 62 in 2001. (But one must be wary of these figures. UNESCO defines an illiterate person as one who cannot, with understanding, both read and write a short, simple statement on their everyday life. By that definition I suspect fewer than half our population would really qualify as literate.) The increase is even more dramatic for female literacy, from nine per cent to 43 per cent. The gender gaps have been closing as female literacy increased much faster than male literacy.
The task of providing elementary education to all children is massive. India is making a major effort now to expand primary education. Our primary school system has become one of the largest in the world, with 150 million children enrolled. But it’s not enough.
We hear more and more from progressive economists about the importance of what they call “human capital”. Human capital is defined as the stock of useful, valuable, and relevant knowledge built up in the process of education and training.