Dropout blot on report card

Just 4 countries, including India, account for about half of the world?s out-of-school children, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Published on: Nov 9, 2006, 03:20:00 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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While giving India a pat on the back for its efforts to achieve Millennium Development Goals, UNESCO’s Global Monitoring Report 2007 says the country may still fall short because of the large number of out-of-school children.

Just four countries, including India, account for about half (28 million) of the world’s out-of-school children. India has the third largest number of such children after Nigeria and Pakistan. And 30 per cent of those enrolled in Indian schools don’t attend school regularly. However, the report — released on Monday by Kesav Desiraju and Subhash Kuntia, joint secretaries in the HRD Ministry — also says the drop in the number of school dropouts in West Asia from 31 million to 16 million between 1999 and 2004 is largely because of India.

In India, the report says, most such children live in small settlements with no school facilities. They come from the poorest families that cannot afford education costs. To deal with this, Kuntia said the Centre has asked the states to bring about a law to implement Right to Education, and is also thinking of incorporating education in pre-schooling (Integrated Child Development Scheme).

The report highlights the huge difference between government and NGO figures on out-of-school children brought under the primary education fold. A 2004 study conducted by the United Information Service says 4.6 million children in the 6-13 age group have been enrolled whereas the HRD ministry’s 2005 study puts the figure as high as 7.3 million. The disparity, the report says, is due to high absenteeism. The government study says the number of out-of-school children has dropped from 25 million in 2002 to 13.5 million in 2005.

The UNESCO report also touches on teaching crises. It says India has a student-teacher ratio of 1:41, the poorest among developing countries and about 20 per cent of Indian teachers remain unauthorisedly absent from schools.

Email: chetan@hindustantimes.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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