Apropos the article "Wrong target for benign neglect" (June 27) by T N Ninan, India's future leaders cannot even cope with Class 2 reading and arithmetic. Isn't that disheartening? Illiteracy is a much deeper malaise than any other malaise affecting India right now and it is growing at an alarming pace.
And the solution lies at the grassroots, not in the hallowed portals of management and technology institutes. First, we need to redefine literacy. Is it merely going to be the number of students who enroll and graduate every year or who actually learn to grasp what is taught? Government schools need to ramp up their infrastructure and teacher-student ratio as most of the population still cannot afford the hefty fees that the private counterparts demand.
We need to urgently shift from rote-learning to practical learning because every student's needs are different. Engaging in a highly productive manner with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and other parties in this field can yield the desired results and propel us to our dream of being an actual superpower.
Gaurav Gupta New Delhi
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