Tehelka::Education is Integral To India's Big Dream Of Human Empowerment

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Education Is Integral To India’s Big Dream Of Human Empowerment

One needs to find reasons for the poor index of human security. Especially in a country like India that aspires to be one of the relevant powers of the 21st century

C. UDAY BHASKAR

A FEW MONTHS ago India’s GDP crossed the one trillion dollar mark and if this was cause for some cheer, the more recent Forbes report, that on current individual fiscal worth, the number of Indian billionaires was greater than that of China seemed to burnish the image of a nation swiftly moving up the global ladder. However this feelgood mood was brought into sharp and unflattering context by two UN reports released last week. The UN Development Report for 2007 noted that on the Human Development Index (HDI), India had slipped from its rank of 126 in 2006 to 128 in 2007. And then, the UNESCO Education for All: Global Monitoring Report confirmed the downward trend when it announced that India had slipped from a rank of 100 to 105 over the last year.

While the UNDP Report this year dwelt more on climate change and its long term implications, taken together, these two reports and their assessment of India in terms of individual human security is cause for deep concern and should not be glossed over.
Illustration: NAOREM ASHISH


Some random figures as related to India and South Asia are deeply disturbing. India ranks 62 among 108 developing nations in the global Human Poverty Index . Despite the fact that India's per capita GDP has doubled in the 15 year period from 1990-2005, as many as 380 million Indians are afflicted by the DAD syndrome — $1 a day. It is equally shameful that as regards human security, India has had 2.5 million starvation deaths and 2 million sanitation-related deaths — and these are the more stark and visible indicators. China and Brazil with whom India is often compared have been placed at rank 81 and 70 respectively on the 2007 HDI.

To the extent that education is integral to human empowerment thereby creating more viable opportunities for improved individual security, India’s track record is patchy. While it has come down the global education ladder to position 105, it is appalling to acknowledge that for a country that is perceived to be an IT power and the back-office of the 21st century, a third of the world’s illiterates now live in India. Further disaggregated, the UNESCO estimates that India, Nigeria and Pakistan account for 27 percent of the world’s out-of-school children. What is most shameful — yes, that word again — is the fact that India’s deep socio-cultural bias against the girl child comes to the fore in the education domain. While official statistics take credit for a gross enrolment of 95 percent at the primary level, the drop-out at Class I is almost 15 percent — and the gender skewing is distressing. Among the drop-outs at this stage, up to 66 percent are girls and when combined with the gruesome statistics about female feticide, India as a collective stands deeply tainted.

WHAT ARE the reasons for this poor index of human security so unambiguously associated with a nation that aspires to be one of the more relevant powers of the 21st century? Resource constraints — yes, to the extent that India is able to spend only 4.1 percent of GNP for education. Here yet another report, the World Economic Forum and CII document Global Risk Network becomes relevant. Identifying six factors that can slow down the Indian economy, it makes reference to corruption and poor governance as being central to shaping India's potential growth. It may be recalled that when the late Rajiv Gandhi had become Prime Minister in late 1984, he bemoaned the fact that for every rupee that the government allocated towards development — which includes the spectrum of poverty alleviation, socio-economic improvement and education — only 16 paisa went towards the intended purpose with the remainder being siphoned off for personal gain. The grim reality 23 years later is that maybe just 6 paisa of the government rupee reach the sectors it is disbursed for and the rest is part of the corruption and graft malignancy that now engulfs India.

Unless this paradigm changes, it is more likely that next year, India will slip further down the global HDI end education ladder even while faring well at the macroeconomic front. Equitable and sustainable human security for one billion Indians, alas, remains elusive.
From Tehelka Magazine, Vol 4, Issue 48, Dated Dec 15 , 2007