Deepika Singh learnt to sign her name
during one of India’s frenetic mass lit-
eracy campaigns in the early 2000s. The
45-year-old remembers practising for
months in order to write her name on a
form that would then declare her literate.
Almost 17 years on, she signs hesitantly,
her English alphabet all over the place,
some letters upside down, some inside
out. Laboriously signing her name is
the extent of her literacy. But she counts
among India’s 64.6 per cent ‘functionally
literate’ women, exemplifying a rotting,
tick-the-box system.
It has been a decade since India
enacted the Right to Education Act,
which made education a right for chil-
dren between the ages of 6 and 14. The
act boosted available resources and
helped notch up impressive enrolment
figures – currently, only 2.8 per cent of
children are out of school in India, the
first time the figure has fallen below 3 per
cent. But the structural flaws in our edu-
cational system have only deepened in
the past 10 years, which means that while
more children are going to school now,
they are learning less, owing largely to
a glaring shortage of qualified teachers.
Elementary schools in India are lacking
more than 500,000 teachers.
According to the 2018 Annual Statusof Education Report, numeracy and lit-
eracy standards among Indian children
were below par and in some cases even
lower than recorded 10 years earlier in- After five years of schooling, at
age 10-11 years, just 51 per cent of stu-
dents can read a second-grade level text
(appropriate for seven- to eight-year-
olds). A measly 28 per cent of fifth-grade
children were able to do divisions in
arithmetic in 2018, compared to 37 per
cent in 2008.
‘It has to be understood that we are
struggling even with basic literacy and
numeracy,’ the report said, adding that
India was ‘far from becoming an edu-
cated nation’.
India has one of the largest popula-
tions of illiterate people in the world at
266 million, amounting to 35 per cent of
the global total. This is a huge concern for
a developing country, which is expected
to become the world’s second-largest
economy by the year 2050 and which
will have the youngest population in the
world by next year. There is also a price to
pay for such illiteracy in terms of unreal-
ized potential – for India, that has been
estimated at $53.6 billion per year.
NITI Aayog, India’s largest govern-
ment thinktank, has recognized this
as a growing crisis and has asked for
government spending on education to be
doubled.
‘In the next three years, we must
focus on introducing changes that help
produce improved learning outcomes
in the short term as well as lay down
the foundation of long-term strategic
change,’ the thinktank said in a report,
adding that the right to education must
‘become a right to learning, instead of
being, as it currently is, a right to go to
school’.
Public consultation on the draft of a
new National Education Policy which
aims to revamp India’s education system
closed at the end of June. But the success
of any such policy in India depends more
on action than intent. In the last decade,
India has crossed a huge hurdle and suc-
ceeded in bringing the vast majority of
children to schools. The challenge now is
to educate them. ONILANJANA BHOWMICK IS A MULTI-AWARD-
WINNING JOURNALIST BASED IN NEW DELHI. SHE
IS AN INDEPENDENT COMMENTATOR ON GENDER
AND POLITICS. SHE TWEETS @NILANJANABEnrolment does not equal education
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