UNESCO Report: Largest illiterate population remains to be Indian

Despite the ‘rapid advances’ made by the country in cutting down the numbers of school drop outs, India is still found to house the largest number of illiterate adults in the world. The gloomy finding was released by Unesco in its ‘The Education for All Global Monitoring Report 2010'.

According to the Unesco report on global education status, out of the total 759 million illiterate adults in the world, India still has the highest number.
Commenting that the progress made has been ‘painfully slow’, it adds that more than half of the total illiterate adults live in just four countries, namely, Bangladesh, China, India and Pakistan.
 
The report is also apprehensive that the slow paced progress made in the eradication of illiteracy might even make the accomplishment of the Millennium Development Goals impossible.

Speaking at the launch of the report that has been published in the backdrop of the financial crisis, Unesco's executive director Irina Bokova said that the global economic slow down has also made the parents pull their children out of school. The financial crisis would also make governments hesitant to fund on education. She warned that the present economic crisis would end up in creating a lost generation who would in turn be a tremendous cost to the society.

The report estimates that about 72 million primary school age children and another 71 million adolescents still remain to be out of school. On the basis of current trends, the report says that 56 million primary school age children will be kept out of school in 2015.

However, the report places due importance on India’ progress and states that while in 1985 -1994 just about half of the adults in the country were literate, now the number has gone up to two-thirds. The report calls it a real progress as the adult population has been increased by 45 per cent.

Gender disparities too have been prominent as the statistics from twenty eight nations across the developing world indicates that for every 10 boys only nine or fewer girls study in schools. Moreover, women constitute two-thirds of the total illiterate population.

The report has drawn a few optimistic lines when it speaks of the advancements made under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (universal primary education) programme launched in India. This scheme has enabled a decline of almost 15 million in the total number of out-of-school children in the two years after the 2001.

With the exception of China, the report states that, the slow progress made by other developing countries would make the achievement of the set targets difficult. If the current trends are to be believed, the underperforming world would reach only less than halfway towards this goal by 2015. India alone is expected to have a deficit of some 81 million literate people.

It was also revealed that low-income countries provide poor quality education. Meanwhile, social evils like caste system were found to hinder educational progress in South Asia.