Recently, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) published the “Education for All” Global Monitoring Report to evaluate the progress of countries on these goals. Critically comment on its findings on India’s performance. (200 Words)
164 countries entered into the Dakar framework in 2000, setting “Education for All” as their goal. UNESCO has recently released a report to assess the progress made by the countries towards the objective. India has fared well on most counts –
- Enrolment targets – India is either on track or has already achieved most of its enrolment targets including 80% pre-primary enrolment, 100% primary enrolment and 100% youth enrolment in schools.
- Gender Parity – India is the only nation in all of South and West Asia to achieve gender parity in primary and lower secondary enrolments.
- Adult illiteracy – This is the one region where India has not even come close to achieving its target, having developed only 26% adult literacy, whereas the target was 50%. Most other nations too have fared badly, with only 25% managing to achieve this target.
- Education expenditure – This is one area where India has been criticized by the report as well as local education activists, saying that government expenditure on education needs to be increased. The report also disapproves of more and more teachers being hired on contract basis. This is significant in the light of some state governments like Rajasthan curtailing the number of schools, to streamline expenditure, which might in fact harm the education statistics in the future.
- Quality of education – The UNESCO report draws on both ASER (Annual State of Education Report) by an NGO and NAS (National Achievement Survey) by NCERT to point out that students across the country are not performing according to their grade level. This, points to a serious lacunae in the education system.