The Hindu : National : India questions UNESCO report

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Nov 10, 2005

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India questions UNESCO report

Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI: India on Wednesday questioned UNESCO's Global Monitoring Report (GMR) 2006 on Education for All (EFA) on several counts including its non-inclusion in the list of countries that stood a chance of attaining the Dakar goal of universal primary education (UPE) by 2015.

(In April 2000 participants from 164 countries gathered in Dakar, Senegal, and adopted the "Dakar Framework for Action, Education for All: Meeting Our Collective Commitments." The document reaffirmed the goal of education for all as laid out by the 1990 "World Conference on Education for All" held in Jomtien, Thailand, and other international conferences. It committed governments to achieving quality basic education for all by 2015 or earlier, with particular emphasis on girls' education, and included a pledge from donor countries and institutions that "no country seriously committed to basic education will be thwarted in the achievement of this goal by lack of resources.")

`Major omission'

Reacting to the India-specific data provided in the GMR immediately after it was unveiled here along with its worldwide release, Human Resource Development Ministry Secretary in-charge of the Department of Elementary Education and Literacy Kumud Bansal described the failure to include India as a country with prospects for achieving UPE by 2015 as a "major omission."

Also, Ms. Bansal found fault with India's EFA Development Index (EDI) calculated in the GMR. The GMR recorded a 0.045 improvement in India's EDI from 0.696 in 2001 to 0.741 in 2002.

"This takes into account an adult literacy rate of around 60 per cent only for India although this is lower than the rate reported by Census 2001 and subsequently. If the actual literacy rate is taken into account, the EDI for India is likely to be higher."

India's contention

On the GMR's conclusion that India is at a risk of not achieving the Dakar goal of improving literacy by at least 50 per cent by 2015, India's contention is that the report does not take into account the literacy rate of 71 per cent reported by the 2001 Census for the 15-35 year age group.

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