The Hindu : Projections based on dated figures, says Joshi

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Saturday, Nov 08, 2003

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Projections based on dated figures, says Joshi

By Our Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI NOV. 7. Upset by the dismal forecast of India's chances in meeting the Dakar goals in UNESCO's Education For All (EFA) Global Monitoring Report, the Government today went public with its objections — hitherto aired through the official channels of communication — to the selective acceptance of data provided to the U.N. agency for the preparation of this study.

Briefing mediapersons here on next week's high-level group meeting on EFA, the Union Human Resource Development Minister, Murli Manohar Joshi, said the projections made in the report — released on Thursday — were primarily based on the 1991 Census figures, and did not reflect the advances made by the country in the field of education over the past 12 years.

Without attributing motives to UNESCO's insistence on rejecting the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) data when other U.N. agencies had accepted it, Dr. Joshi said India had registered its protest on October 22 to the ``sweeping generalisations and classification of countries that have been made on what can best be described as selective acceptance of data''. In the letter, the Ministry expressed its anguish at India being portrayed as being at risk of not achieving gender parity at primary and secondary levels of education by 2015.

Confident that India would reach the Dakar targets on time, the Elementary Education & Literacy Secretary, S. C. Tripathi, said the Ministry had asked UNESCO to use NFHS data — collected in 1998-99 and accepted by other international agencies — in the absence of the disaggregated age-wise break-up sought by the U.N. agency for this study.

While the report reflects the latest data available on the Net Enrolment Ratio in primary education, the Ministry's contention is that the refusal to accept up-to-date information on other parameters had placed India among countries way down in the EFA Development Index (EDI), along with sub-Saharan Africa and some of its immediate neighbours. According to Mr. Tripathi, had UNESCO accepted the country's data on the various parameters for calculating EDI, India would have been positioned among the comity of nations.

Maintaining that there was no ``deliberate manipulation of data relating to any country'', UNESCO's explanation for not accepting the information provided by India is that the disaggregated data for literacy was not made available in time for the finalisation of the report.

India, according to UNESCO, supplied overall estimates for 1999 — based on data collected by the NHFS in 1998-99 — on May 29, 2003, which was too late for the report as ``it is not simply a matter of reproducing the data, but validating it and feeding it into an estimation process to produce projections''.

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