I am delighted to be here today to listen to my school friend Amartya Sen. I am glad that Pratichi Trust, Asian Development Research Institute, Patna and the National Literacy Mission have jointly hosted this unique event.
The subject of Amartya’s lecture today is 'The Centrality of Literacy'. It has taken economists time to appreciate the centrality of literacy & education to economic and social development & empowerment of people. I have often drawn attention to the simple statistic that there is no modern industrial nation that does not have a minimum of 80 per cent literacy.
Even at the end of the first decade of the 21st Century, which we so proudly hail as the 'Knowledge Century', a quarter to a third of our people remain 'illiterate'. It is even more unfortunate that a strong gender bias against women persists in the spread of literacy. To make India fully literate and to eliminate the gender bias, literacy – therefore – must be our immediate priority goal.
When one looks around the world and studies the history of the promotion of universal literacy, it is clear that a combination of governmental intervention and support and civil society mobilisation has always worked best. Consider the example of Kerala, where literacy rates have been high for a long time. Kerala’s achievement is a testimony to the good work done both by successive governments and by a range of civil society movements, religious institutions and non-governmental organisations.
The challenge before us in India, therefore, is to seek a productive collaboration between government and civil society organisations like Pratichi Trust to implement durable strategies for universal literacy and mass education. It is in recognition of this centrality of literacy that Rajiv Gandhiji launched the National Literacy Mission in 1988. This mission mode approach helped India record the highest decadal rate of growth in literacy – 12 percentage points – between 1991-2001.
Despite significant gains, we still have a very long way to go. According to Unesco’s Global Monitoring Report 2006, out of 771 million illiterates in the world, 268 million are estimated to be residing in our country — nearly one-third of the world's non-literates. Even though India's GDP has recorded a very high growth rate in the recent past, the inferior literacy status of our country has contributed to the lowering of our position in the UNDP’s Human Development Index.
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Our government has taken a series of important steps in the past six years to make the light of literacy and education shine for every child, every citizen — irrespective of gender, caste or religion. We have placed special emphasis on the funding and implementation of 'Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan', for the age group of 6-14 years. For removing adult illiteracy, we launched the 'Saakshar Bharat' programme last year with a special focus on female literacy. In launching ‘Saakshar Bharat’, the government acknowledged that adult education is as important as formal education.
It is our government’s commitment that paucity of funds will not be allowed to limit the spread of literacy and education in our country. It is on the foundation of this fiscal commitment and political resolve that we went to Parliament and added a new Fundamental Right to our Constitution — the Right to Education.
My friend Amartya knows very well that I am what I am today because of the investment that my family and my country made in my education. There are millions of Indians like me who enter their adulthood with no other asset than education. But what an asset education is! It is the most important differentiator, the most effective multiplier. Education is, of course, far more than mere literacy. But it is literacy that stirs in our soul the unending search for knowledge. Alphabets are the building blocks of human civilisation.
I sincerely hope that we in India can pool our energies together to ensure that every one of our citizens is awakened by the light of literacy and empowered by the energy of education.
(Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's remarks at a lecture by Amartya Sen on ‘Centrality of Literacy’ in New Delhi on August 3)