With the passing of yet another International Literacy Day on 8 September and after National Education Day on 11 November, India needs to analyse the problem of its literacy levels and learning. A report based on a 2017-18 survey by the National Statistics Office put the country’s overall literacy rate at 77.7 per cent, which is far from the goal of full literacy by 2030. So, the question remains: For whom do the school bells toll?

The essence of the problem was summed up by Mahatma Gandhi in his historic statement at Chatham House, London, in 1931: “The British administrators, when they came to India, instead of taking hold of things as they were, began to root them out. The village schools were not good enough for the British administrator, so he came out with his own programme which was, however, too expensive to fulfill ~ a programme of compulsory primary education of these masses inside of a century”.

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Free India did not have the will to fulfill Gandhi’s dream of reviving the ancient tradition of the village school master supported by the community. Instead, the government chose to continue with efforts to educate the masses through a vast, centralised machinery and superstructure of staff and resources based on the European pattern. Successive efforts at universalising primary education ranged from Operation Blackboard to Education for All.

The Adult Literacy Campaign and, lately, the investment thrust on primary education to produce the literate child carries within itself the hidden suspicion that the goal of universal education for the masses may even be quietly set aside one day, planners having perhaps finally realised that the goal itself is unattainable within the present system. The success of this system depends solely on expenses and affordability.

It thus gave rise to a situation where masses of underprivileged and under-educated children face a largely urban elite population of privileged school children. The directive principles of state policy in our Constitution have significant promises. Article 41 states, “The State shall, within the limits of its economic capacity and development, make effective provision for securing the right to work, to educate and to public assistance in cases of unemployment, old age, sickness and disablement and in other cases of undeserved ones”.

Close on its heels comes Article 45: “The State shall endeavour to provide, within a period of ten years from the commencement of the Constitution, for free and compulsory education for all children until they complete the age of fourteen.” Sadly, for more than seven decades, these articles have been almost dormant. Imparting education, including induction of children into primary and secondary schools, has remained a mere ritual.

Amidst commitments, Article 41 has a rider indicating that the State will perform such tasks “within the limits of its economic capacity”. Even Article 45 commits that the State should only “endeavour”  to send children to school. And, “endeavour” on the part of the State is yet to be proved. Nearly one-half of our country continues to be functionally illiterate. Those who are called literate are barely able to inscribe their signature. Among them, too, the proportion of those who lapse into illiteracy is alarmingly high.

Whereas the proportion of literate children in the age group of 6-14 has been going up over the decades, the dropout rate has also been soaring. The sorry state of affairs continues despite lofty schemes like the midday meal scheme and Total Literacy Campaign. Added to this was the 86th amendment to the Constitution and the Right of children to Free and Compulsory Education Act. But, sadly again, illiteracy could not be wiped out. We only kept citing the example of China which did it within a decade of the People’s Republic.

Or else, we remained silent spectators of the feat of a tiny country named Nicaragua, which had as high a rate of illiteracy as 92 per cent when the Sandinistas assumed power for the first time in the 1970s. They, with all their passion and commitment, brought that rate down to less than 10 per cent. All five-year-plans have provided financial allocations, set targets, laid out modus operandi and emphasised the role of literacy programmes in national development.

But the fact remains that a successful literacy drive remains elusive. Realising the lacuna, the Union government, in 1988, initiated the National Literacy Mission with a view to turning the literacy drive into a popular movement. But this also proved to be a story of mixed success. The situation in some states like Andhra Pradesh remained worrying. Besides, female illiteracy remains consistently lower than levels of male literacy, even in better performing states.

Considering that illiteracy in the 20th century is dangerous from the point of view of survival, the Saakshar Bharat Mission, a literacy-cumcontinuous learning programme was begun in 2009. It trained 7.6 crore people in literacy by March 2018 through an informal but structured process out of the 24 crore that the 2011 census had counted as illiterate. However, the SBM lapsed with the present government promising a remodeled programme: the Padhna Likhna Abhiyaan that is yet to take shape.

The seriousness of the proposed Abhiyaan is doubted as there is only a vague hint about a volunteer army of students and teachers. Neo-literate individuals require practice or even continuous learning and the big gap means that many would have returned to illiteracy adding to India’s more than 16 crore estimated illiterates as of now. With the SBM in limbo and no new scheme in active operation, it may be assumed that India is now faced with a tougher challenge to achieve 100 per cent literacy by 2030. Who Is to blame for all the ambiguities?

Indeed, the policy makers ~ as the planning behind a scheme such as the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan suggests that politicians are responsible for the confusion. A survey conducted by the Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability and Childright and You unraveled a lopsidedness in the money spent on different heads in school education. The states were found to have spent the largest chunk of their education budgets on teachers’ salaries while the percentage of the budget spent on training teachers, monitoring community involvement, creating a pool of resource persons, system of appraisals and supervision is stupendously low. Ironically the SSA lays stress on the latter aspects.

While lip service is always paid to the significance of good education, its quality, the need for varied achievements and fulfilment of different types of potential fail to arouse interest. Annual Status Education Reports across the years suggested that the educational foundation of most children was extremely weak.

The new National Education Policy has proposed preschooling to support the educational foundation of learners, but, to our disappointment, the anganwadis that are supposed to cooperate with them in this task are not well-equipped. They were started as rural child-care centres under the Integrated Child Development Services programme, primarily to combat child hunger and malnutrition.

The workers there are not qualified enough to be able to do justice to the job of educating children. What has been prioritised is “school readiness”, but neither anganwadi centres nor primary schools grant the liberty to try novel ways of learning. One is bewildered to think as to how school readiness could be achieved without infrastructural transformation, procedural modifications and resource allocation.

While discussing the topic with my colleagues, a small voice piped in: “Children, you know, are now even more concerned about literacy and the future of the country than some of our politicians, but their views and sentiments have little bearing on those who frame the education policy”. Several policies later, complete literacy ~ one of the first slogans raised from the ramparts of the Red Fort 74 years ago ~ still remains a distant dream.

(The writer, a former Associate Professor, Department of English, Gurudas College, Kolkata, is presently with Rabindra Bharati University)