India has slipped five ranks since last year to 105 on global education parameters leading to fears that the country would miss most of the millennium development goals for its children, according to a report by UN education watchdog UNESCO.
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UNESCO's Director-General Koichiro Matsuura said despite remarkable strides towards the UN's Education For All by 2015 programme, huge gender disparity remains a problem for India. "Girls account for 66 per cent of out-of-the-school children in the region, the highest share worldwide," he said at UNESCO's regional conference on literacy in Delhi on Thursday.
Matsuura also pointed out that a large number of children leave school without basic literacy and numeric skills because of poor quality of education in most schools.
The report shows that India's gross enrollment ratio is about 95 per cent, but the overall dropout rate is as high as 14.4 per cent for Class I.
Among the dropouts, about 66 per cent are girls, the report says.
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With these stumbling blocks, the report clearly says that India will not be able to meet the target of Education for All by 2015.
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With these stumbling blocks, the report clearly says that India will not be able to meet the target of Education for All by 2015.
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UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi, however, reiterated that India would provide elementary education to all by 2010. But she admitted that the challenge was to ensure full enrollment, reduction in dropout rates and to impart quality education.
The UNESCO report projects that by 2015, India would achieve the literacy target of just 71 per cent although Human Resource Minister Arjun Singh promised to educate 85 per cent of the country's population by 2012. At present, one-third of world's illiterates are in India.
The report shows that India has improved on most education and child health indicators but other countries have done much better.
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.
