Indian poor kids illiterate despite 4 years of education: UNESCO Report
In India, 90 percent of children from poor families remain illiterate
despite completing four years of school education. Also, around 30
percent of children reach the illiteracy rate even after attending
five-six years of school.
Other than this, only 44 percent of rural
students in Maharashtra and 53 percent student in Tamil Nadu in Std V
age group could perform two digit subtraction sums.
These are just a few to name among the many alarming findings in UNESCO's 11th Education For All (EFA) Global monitoring report.
IT clearly depicts that though progress is taking place, most EFA goals
to be achieved till 2015 are being missed. As per the report, the speed
of achieving universal primary education, lower secondary education and
youth literacy is woefully slow in various nations.
Keeping
India in mind, the report said that though the rich young women have
already achieved universal literacy, the poor are projected to reach
there only by 2080. Reporting on the financial education
trends, for all the nations, the report states that: "Around the
world, governments are grappling with ways to reallocate their education
budgets to those children most in need. Allocations per child still do
not adequately reflect the costs of delivering quality education to the
marginalized."
According to the report, in India analysis,
Kerela being one of the wealthier states, spend merely 685$ per child on
education. The figure is only 100$ in Bihar.
The reports have
suggested that one of the new EFA goals after 2015 should be setting a
target for all countries to allocate at least six percent of the GNP to
education and at least 20 percent of the total government expenditure on
education.
India has been in the list of those 10 countries
that have progressed very fast in being able to reduce the children
drop-out rate in recent years, but it has also created a learning
crisis. Nearly 250 million children across the globe fail to learn the
basics, one-third of which are based in South and West Asia.
The
progress is too slow especially for the disadvantaged. Mathematics
remains a struggle for many. The gaps between rich and poor states in
India is widening day by say. Besides this, poverty decreases the
chances of students continuing school education for a long time. In U.P.
only 70 percent of poor kids make it Std V, whereas in MP only 85
percent of poor kids attend schools compared to 96 percent in rich
children.
