Mobile School for Sundel selling Children at Marina Beach by Chennai Corporation scheme Education for all Sarva Siksha Abhiyan (SSA) Photo S. Thanthoni

The Hindu: India still has the largest number of illiterate adults in the world, but has made “rapid advances” in cutting down the numbers of school drop outs, a new UN report on education has said.

The Education For All-Global Monitoring Report, released here on Wednesday finds that out of the total 759 million illiterate adults in the world, India still has the highest number.

“Over half of the illiterate adults live in just four countries: Bangladesh, China, India and Pakistan,” the report said, adding the progress has been “painfully slow” and threatens to obstruct the Millennium Development Goals.

It said about 72 million primary school age children and another 71 million adolescents are not at school, and on current trends, 56 million primary school age children will still be out of school in 2015, it said.

UNESCO’s top official Irina Bokova said the world body was apprehensive that the financial crisis would cause governments to scale back funding on education.

“With the world’s largest illiterate population, India has been making progress,” the report said.

While in 1985 -1994 just about half of the adults in the country were literate, now the number has gone up to two-thirds. “Since the adult population increased by 45 per cent, this marks a real advance,” it said.

Gender disparities remain deeply engrained, with 28 nations across the developing world having nine or fewer girls in school for every 10 boys.

The report said two-thirds of the total illiterate people are women.
On a positive note, it says that out-of-school numbers have fallen “driven by rapid advances in India”. In the three years to 2007, out-of-school population fell by 8 million.

“Much of the decline took place in India, which reported a fall of almost 15 million in out-of-school numbers in the two years after the 2001 launch of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (universal primary education) programme,” the report said.

It finds that with the exception of China, progress towards halving illiteracy has been “painfully slow,” which will make meeting MDG targets difficult.

“On current trends, the world will be less than halfway towards this goal by 2015. India alone will have a shortfall of some 81 million literate people,” it said.

Ms. Bokova, Executive Director of the UN body for education, warned that the present financial crisis would cause parents and governments to scale back on educating their children.

The Education For All Monitoring Global Report comes out in the backdrop of a financial crisis that is driving millions into extreme poverty. “In short it would create a lost generation… a tremendous cost to society,” she added.

“It could force governments to cut their spending on education and parents to pull their children out of school or simply not to send them,” Ms. Bokova said, at the launch of the report here at the UN headquarters.

The report also finds that low-income countries provide poor quality education and caste system obstructs education in South Asia.

Article from The Hindu | Link

Mr. Prasad was born into the Pasi community, once considered untouchable on the ancient Hindu caste order. Today, a chain-smoking, irrepressible didact, he is the rare outcaste columnist in the English language press and a professional provocateur. His latest crusade is to argue that India’s economic liberalization is about to do the unthinkable: destroy the caste system. The last 17 years of new capitalism have already allowed his people, or Dalits, as they call themselves, to “escape hunger and humiliation,” he says, if not residual prejudice.

At a time of tremendous upheaval in India, Mr. Prasad is a lightning rod for one of the country’s most wrenching debates: Has India’s embrace of economic reforms really uplifted those who were consigned for centuries to the bottom of the social ladder? Mr. Prasad, who guesses himself to be in his late 40s because his birthday was never recorded, is an anomaly, often the lone Dalit in Delhi gatherings of high-born intelligentsia.

He has the zeal of an ideological convert: he used to be a Maoist revolutionary who, by his own admission, dressed badly, carried a pistol and recruited his people to kill their upper-caste landlords. He claims to have failed in that mission.

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Local leaders have sought an inquiry into the incident as the police appear to be siding with the upper caste girl’s family and the teacher.

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Today, that bare patch of land is a two level school-building (co-built by Sukhdev) with 200 small students. One just has to see the children, see their faces, to know just how important this school is for their lives. Here, they learn to count; to read; to write; mathematics; spelling, and basic life skills such as how to care for their clothing, how to respect their friends and class mates, how to give to others and what it is to be members of a community rather than outcasts. In the morning they say their prayers (in Sanskrit, English and Hindi). On Saturdays, music is played over speakers and they dance and play. Amsitad International provides enough funding so that, once a week, all of the students are fed.

But more personally, one just have to see the children pulling at Rajan Saini’s salwa kameez to show their injuries so that she can clean them, nurture them, care for them to see the impact Raj is making on the lives of these children. Their parents quite often laugh that they treat Raj like their mother. And, in many crucial sense, she is. As Raj likes to say, “They are my children, my responsibility, I must do this.”

But the situation of the school is still quite difficult. The teachers find it an uphill battle trying to convince the children and their families of the value and importance of coming to school. Once a week, on Saturdays, they visit the families of the children to check on their welfare, their health, and to try to convince the parents who have withdrawn their children of the importance of their education. Moreover, a sad story: while my husband and I were there, we were told of a small girl whose mother told Raj that the father was planning on selling her for prostitution. In response, the school teachers were extra vigilant of this small one, making sure that if the father came to take her home that they held onto her. But there is only so much they can do, they don’t have the funds to take her in and protect her permanently, and given it is heresay it’s not quite on the level to get the police involved. But these things happen. Sarnath is in Uttar Pradesh, one of the poorer states in India, the most populated state, and one where the caste system is still deeply entrenched, where dowry murder still occurs, where corruption still prolific at all levels.

But, even in such a difficult space, there is room for much inspiration. Before the sponsorship of Amistad International, Raj had to meet costs for transporting the children to the school. To meet this cost, she sold one of her most precious possessions, her gold wedding necklace (the Hindu version of a wedding ring). When we visited this time, my husband and I happened to bring her a gold-plated locket from New Zealand as a gift. Initially, she thought it was artificial gold, and accepted it graciously. However, when her teachers suggested that it glittered as though it was real, she took it off and placed it on her altar. Later that evening she approached me and asked whether it was real gold. I told her it was gold plated, and I could see the emotion building in her face. When I hugged her, she broke into tears, and spoke of the pain she had felt in having to sell her necklace. Summoning her inner resolve, she held the locket and committed to putting a photo of Mother Theresa inside and to wear it always. This one she will never sell. And I believe it to be true. Such is the inner strength and resolve of this amazing woman.

How do such things emerge in the world, from absolutely nothing but an idea, to bloom into such entities as the Buddha’s Smile School that impact on hundreds of people’s lives? They emerge from the imagination, courage and sense of inner purpose of such amazing people as Rajani Saini; of such humble, courageous, fallible people who never lose faith that this is their responsibility in life, to love and care for those around them in the ways in which they can.

Bronwyn Finnigan

Here is a excerpt:

Dream in Sarnath: Buddha’s Smile School

by Vanessa Turner

I have seen miracles in action here and hope our dreams will come true.

First, let me begin by saying that until I saw it with my own eyes, I had no conception of the intensity of the poverty, destitution, and sheer starvation that beset many of the local poor in the area of Ashapur, Sarnath, and the larger city of Varanasi. The suffering here is so prevalent it is almost nightmarish. I have seen far too many beggars’ children, age five and below, walking barefoot and nude under the scorching Indian sun, their bodies so emaciated and ruined by hunger and malnutrition that you can see the cracks in their bones and the outline of the skeleton frame against their dry and pallid skin. Many have swollen stomachs, a sign of severe malnutrition, and these sights have become so mundane and banal to the local affluent (upper caste) people of this area as to become inconsequential to those who are not affected by such poverty. The lack of attention and sheer humanity to this epidemic of childhood poverty and mortality among the shudra, or untouchable caste of Uttar Pradesh (the larger state within which Sarnath and Varanasi are couched) is truly astounding to me, for I cannot understand how any human being could bear to walk past a starving young child and not even feel a minor pang of sympathy and an almost innate impulse to pick them up and carry them to a restaurant and feed them for the mere forty rupees (one US dollar) it takes.

Now the situation of the shudra castes in this district is much more severe than many other areas in India. The caste system, though ostensibly outlawed by the Indian government years ago, is acceded to religiously by the locals of Uttar Pradeshian society, and their glaring lack of concern for the increasing number of starving, dying children in the poorer areas of Varanasi is simply tragic. I became involved in Buddha’s Smile School for Underprivileged Children after meeting Rajan only a month into my stay in Sarnath. I am here on a Fulbright scholarship, as encouraged by my teachers, including Alan Wallace and his inspirational wife and my Sanskrit teacher, Vesna. Meeting Raj and her family was like finding a diamond cluster of jewels amidst a narrow-minded society of self-involved people. I was immediately taken by her warmth and open- mindedness, her gentleness and her kindness to me. I was homesick and confused, and she and her family immediately accepted me as a part of their family and insisted I take my every meal with them and their family of husband, wife, and two very young adorable daughters, ages 7 and 2. Our karmic bond and the uncanny feeling of familiarity that we shared led me to believe that it was no accident that I had become so instantly close with this exceptional Indian family, the kind of people who always invited the Rickshaw walas and other beggars and poor locals to their home for chai and food, who would not kill even the smallest insect if it crawled on their floor.

Getting to know Raj even better, I soon became aware of her great mission and current project, a recently-started free school for underprivileged beggar children in the surrounding area that would provide a comprehensive education covering Nursery school to Grade Five, giving them hope and encouragement for a brighter future, opening their young minds and stimulating their innate creativity, teaching them to think critically and to always question everything, to learn the ways of the previous great thinkers of India’s past, such as Gandhi and Mother Theresa.

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