Educating Women and the Impact on Literacy

Surrey based Bikkar Singh Lalli writes "India Must Educate Women To Reduce Population And Raise Healthy Children". Some interesting points from the article:

• According to the latest census data, the adult literacy level in India, has reached 74 percent, an increase of 9 percent from the last census.
  
• However, there are still about 260 million illiterate adults in India compared to 70 million in China.
• Fifty percent of world’s “hungry” are living in India.
  
• It is a matter of national shame that, in spite of over 9 percent annual growth in GDP, every fourth Indian is hungry, every third Indian women is anaemic and every third child is underweight and stunted.
• The degree to which child marriage is practised in India is more than double the figure for Pakistan. A 2011 date sheet called “World’s Women and Girls”, released by Washington based Population Reference Bureau, shows that 47 per cent of women between the age of 20 and 24 were married by 18. This is higher than the average for South Central Asia (45%). Even in progressive states like Gujarat and Maharashtra the parents marry off their daughters at an early age.
• According to a special edition of UNICEF’s State of the world Children, issued in Nov. 2010, while globally, annual number of deaths of children under five has fallen from around 12,5 million in 1990 to an estimated 8.8 million in 2008, the mortality rates in India remain unacceptably high, with 5,0000 children dying every day due to preventable causes.
• According to the report, the only good news for India is that fewer children under five are dying as the national mortality rate has fallen from 117 per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 72 in 2007.
  
• The Hindu, May 11: “Delhi has 50, 000 street children- the study done between July 12 and August 28, 2010 – has revealed that one out of every five of the street children was involved in rag picking-this was followed bystreet vending (15.18 per cent), begging (15 per cent). Thirty nine of the street children slept in slums, 46 six per cent in open or public places, and only four per cent slept in shelters provided by non-governmental organizations. Nearly 22 per cent of those surveyed said that they used drugs”.

Mr. Lalli's conclusion:

The best long term solution to tackle the horror of high mother and child mortality is not found in hospitals, but in schools. Thus, India must start vigorously to empower girls with education. An educated girl delays marriage and think of a smaller and planned family.

Amen!

Literacy Challenges

Antara Dev Sen shares her views on Literacy challenges in the Deccan Chronicle:

• We need to look not only at quantity, but also the quality of school education.
  
• More than a quarter of schools do not have proper buildings or drinking water.
  
• Half do not have girls’ toilets.
  
• Most do not have proper teachers.
  
• Teacher absenteeism rages.
  
• Allotments for ICDS and MDM schemes are inadequate and do not always reach students.
  
• And endemic class, caste and gender discriminations spawn systematic deprivation of large sections of society, institutionalising disparity in educational achievements.

Hmmmn....So, what are the solutions? !! Lot of work to do!

The Literacy Project

Studying various Literacy initiatives.

Some pointers from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_India:

• Mizoram: The government identified illiterates and organized an administrative structure that engaged officials and community leaders, and manned by "animators" who were responsible for teaching five illiterates each
• Tamil Nadu took an approach to promoting literacy based on free lunches for schoolchildren, "ignoring cynics who said it was an electoral gimmick and economists who said it made little fiscal sense. 20 million receive free lunches in Indian schools every day, making it the largest school meal program in the world
• Kerala undertook a "campaign for total literacy in Ernakulam district in the late 1980s," with a "fusion between the district administration headed by its Collector on one side and, on the other side, voluntary groups, social activists and others." On February 4, 1990, the Government of Kerala then replicated the initiative on a statewide level, launching the Kerala State Literacy Campaign. First, households were surveyed with door-to-door, multistage survey visits to form an accurate picture of the literacy landscape and areas that needed special focus. Then, Kala Jathas (cultural troupes) and Saksharta Pad Yatras (Literacy Foot Marches) were organized to generate awareness of the campaign and create a receptive social atmosphere for the program. An integrated management system was created involving state officials, prominent social figures, local officials and senior voluntary workers to oversee the execution of the campaign.

Pointers on challenges:

1. Extensive impoverishment, entrenched hierarchical social divisions and the lack of correlation between educational attainment and job opportunities are often cited in studies of the hurdles literacy programs face in Bihar.
   
2. Children from "lower castes" are frequently denied school attendance and harassed when they do attend.
   
3. In areas where there is no discrimination, poor funding and impoverished families means that children often cannot afford textbooks and stationery.
   
4. When children do get educated, the general lack of economic progress in the state means that government jobs are the only alternative to farm labor, yet these jobs, in practise, require bribes to secure - which poorer families cannot afford.
5. This leads to educated youths working on the farms, much as uneducated ones do, and leads parents to question the investment of sending children to school in the first place.
6. Bihar's government schools have also faced teacher absenteeism, leading the state government to threaten withholding of salaries of teachers who failed to conduct classes on a regular basis.
7. To incentivize students to attend, the government announced a Rupee 1 per schoolday grant to poor children who show-up to school.

That does give some idea. Now, onto taking some actions!