Of all the spheres of Indian society where there is an enormous gap between the stated goals and actual achievements, literacy stands out as one of the most depressing, probably next only to unemployment and poverty. In 1991 (the year of latest census), only half the population in India is literate; and going by the present trend, the total literacy in India is approximately half a century away. Besides such low level and slow progress, the literacy scenario in India is also characterised by wide inequities among different sections of the population. Another important weakness of the literacy scenario is that, the widespread illiteracy is found not only among the aged, but also among younger boys and girls because of low enrolment and high dropout rates. Finally, one should also note that literacy is defined very liberally in the population census. If we try to measure literacy in terms of years of schooling, the average is merely 2.4 years in India for persons aged 25 and above (Dreze and Sen, 1995). The current literacy status in India as well as its rate of progress since the fifties would clearly indicate that the issue has generally been neglected here. Among its south-Asian neighbours, although the literacy rate in India is better than in Nepal (27 percent). Pakistan (36 percent) and Bangladesh (37 percent), it is much worse than in Sri Lanka (89 percent). Compared to east and south-east Asian countries, the situation

is again much worse in India, not only with respect to their current literacy rates, but even with respect to the past literacy rates of those countries when they were at a comparable state of economic development. The neglect of literacy as an essential component of development is also indicated by the inadequate allocation of resources for this sector. Although educational expenditure as a proportion of gross national product has increased from a little over 1 percent in early fifties to around 3 percent in early nineties, this is much below the target of 6 percent, recommended in 1966 by the Education Commission (GOI, 1966). Indeed, even this target of 6 percent is much lower than the international average for the developing countries which stood at around 15 percent during the eighties (Basu, 1995).

The latest census of 1991 had recorded the literacy rates in India at 52.2 percent. As mentioned before, this rate is much lower than what one would expect in India which has shown far higher achievements in many other economic and social sphere. However, it is not merely the low rates that characterise the poor state of education in the country. For one, the pace of progress in literacy rates, as revealed by decennial censuses, is very slow in India (Table 1). Between 1961 and 1991, a span of thirty years, literacy rate has gone up by a mere 23.9 percentage points, from 28.3 in 1961 to 52.2 in 1991. In other words, on an average, the literacy rate rises by approximately 8 percentage points in a decade. This is abysmally low compared to the performance of many developing countries, all of which had started their planned development in the second half of this century.

The second distressing aspect of the literacy rates in India is the wide disparity among various social groups. For example, between the two genders, the rates differ by as much as about 25 percentage points and this disparity has persisted all along. No less disturbing is the rural-urban disparity in literacy rates which again differ by ever a wider margin of about 30 percentage points. Here again, the disparity has persisted over the years. One could also mention here that scheduled castes and scheduled tribes form two other specially disadvantaged population groups in India and disparity in their case too is equally wide and persisting.

Finally, there again exists a wide disparity among the various regions/states in India vis-à-vis their literacy rates (Table 1). At the top of the hierarchy, lies the state of Kerala which has an exceptionally high literacy rate of 89.8 percent. This is basically because of strong social movements in this state even during the pre-independence period. For the second most literate state, the literacy rate is much lower at 64.9 percent and, for Bihar (the least literate state) the rate is merely 38.5 percent. Thus, even after excluding Kerala, the difference between the second most literate state and the least literate state is as wide as 26.4 percentage points. It is also not always true the literacy rates are higher only in economically rich states – for example, Kerala where the rate is the highest is a middle-income state and the literacy rate in poor-income state Assam is above the national average. This basically indicates the immense role of social factors, besides the economic ones, in promoting literacy.

A number of factors could be cited as the cause behind such utter neglect of education; but what possibly works at the root of these factors is the planners’ perspective on education, i.e., why literacy and education is necessary or relevant. Broadly speaking, this perspective in the Indian context has been that literacy is essentially a welfare programme and, until the time when economic development has reached a sufficiently high state enabling the people to arrange and pay for their own literacy needs, the government has to shoulder this responsibility because of its social and welfare implications. The contribution of literacy to the process of development as such was thought to be marginal, because literacy and education were not considered as a force which could propel economic growth; it could at most sustain the development process once it has already been initiated through other dimensions of the planning strategy. Obviously, within this narrow perspective, literacy received a much lower priority than was necessary to transform the sector whose earlier development was dictated by colonial policies. And this lower priority was manifested not only through lower resource allocation for the sector, but through a clear lack of consistency and clarity in educational policies (Dreze and Sen, 1995).

In the recent period, roughly since the early eighties, there has been some changes in this policy perspective. An appreciation of the potential contribution of education to the development process, besides its welfare contributions, marked this change. In this perspective, education is recognised as a direct contributor to the development process since it is, along with health, a basic input for human resource development which, in turn, could be an important source of development. Basically, this strategy maintains that it is possible for developing countries to change their comparative advantage from commodity and other low-skill labour intensive products to more skill-intensive goods and services through the deliberate expansion of human resource development. As a logical extension of this possibility, the strategy also emphasises the necessity of favouring human resource investment ‘beyond’ what would occur in the natural course of development (Behrman, 1990). Some of the recent policy trends in India are probably indicative of such efforts in human resource investment. First, the expenditure on education as a percentage of GDP had continued to increase – from 2.54 for the triennium around 1979-80 to 3.26 for the triennium around 1989-90, although the percentage of expenditure on many other components of social and community services has remained nearly stagnant. Secondly, there was an increase in the share of primary education in the total educational expenditure (Tilak, 1993), enabling the government to launch literacy programmes outside the formal system. And finally, there were a number of policy exercises to restructure the education system in accordance with the new perspective on education. However, as a result of the structural adjustment programme of the government since the beginning of nineties, the resource commitment for education (in terms of expenditure as percentage of GDP) has started declining, but other dimensions of the change are probably still visible.

One of the major initiative of the government towards promotion of literacy has been the establishment of the National Literacy Mission to strengthen the adult literacy efforts in the country. It was established in 1989 and in last ten years, it has already made noticeable impact on the literacy scenario in India.

The National Literacy Mission which was set up in 1988 took over the National Adult Education Programme as it was conceptualised in 1978. The National Adult Education Programme followed the centre-based approach under the Rural Functional Literacy Projects.

The National Literacy Mission was initially conceived as a societal mission implying political will at all levels for the achievement of the Mission’s goals which were to be achieved in a time bound manner. It was set up with the objective of making 80 million persons functionally literate by the year 1995. The launching of the Mission therefore led to a review of all the ongoing programmes at that time. Between 1978-85, the programme was evaluated by a number of professional evaluating agencies. These evaluations had pointed out repeatedly about the ills of the earlier programmes out of which the major ones were that

In spite of these types of deficiencies being pointed out repeatedly in successive evaluation studies, there was lack of adequate effort to tackle these problems. What the NLM tried to do between 1988 and 1990 was to consolidate the earlier centre-based programmes to make its implementation more effective. The NLM had also prepared detailed guidelines for this programme and made several improvements in its administrative procedures. But the situation did not improve, because there was no concept of involvement of the community or creating an environment for literacy and generation of demand. The mode of implementation was through a bureaucratic process and structure. The teaching learning period was excessively long leading to substantial dropouts. Another aspect was the mushrooming growth of voluntary agencies from 1978 onwards. Although many adverse evaluation reports and audit objections were received, not enough attention was paid to the ability of voluntary agencies to implement such programmes and selection of really good voluntary agencies.

It is because of these reasons that despite many changes, even subsequent evaluation studies, between 1988 and 1990, also pointed out persistence of the earlier weaknesses of the adult education programmes. One notable exception to the centre-based approach and an experiment with the campaign mode was first seen in Kottayam city in Kerala. But, the real breakthrough came, not out of wisdom internal to the NLM but with an experiment in mass literacy campaign initiated in 1989 and successfully completed in 1990 in Ernakulam district in Kerala. The campaign for total literacy in Ernakulam saw a fusion between the district administration headed by its Collector, voluntary groups, social activists and others, and was spearheaded by the Kerala Shastra Sahitya Parishad (KSSP). Ernakulam achieved this objective on 4th February, 1990 and along with it the unique distinction of being the first district in the county to become ‘fully’ literate. Ernakulam was declared to become ‘totally literate’ and that declaration led to the launching of a statewide campaign in Kerala, a campaign more challenging in size and complexity. The Kerala State Literacy Campaign covered 18 lakh persons in the age group of 6-60 years within a span of one year. The mechanism evolved and brought to bear upon the implementation process in order to assess the intended goals included several measures :

The Directorate of Adult Education, Government of India took up the task of monitoring of literacy campaigns seriously from 1993 onwards and streamlined the monitoring of the literacy campaigns under implementation. However, it is not the objective of monitoring of the programmes to merely provide information for financial or programmes audit. The objective of monitoring the programmes has been taken in a much wider sense in the National Literacy Mission in the past one year and the campaigns are also subjected to independent assessments/scrutiny by people from different walks of life and sections of society. The periodical reports and returns that are brought out by evaluating agency or Joint Evaluation Teams are not the only mechanism of monitoring the programmes. They are supplemented by visits to the campaigns by Consultants to the National Literacy Mission, other non-officials, media persons, social activists etc. The current initiative of evaluation of the literacy campaigns under the guidance of the Expert Group headed by Prof. Arun Ghosh is a pioneering effort in this direction.

Apart from the districtwise evaluation, the NLM had also attempted a national level evaluation of the impact of the literacy campaign with the help of National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) in 1997. In that year, NSSO was requested to estimate the literacy rates for all the states and the country as a whole, so that NLM could judge whether the progress of literacy since 1991 (the latest census year) was faster than what was observed before. These survey had revealed the following heartening trends (Table 2) :

India is too large a country to be a homogeneous one either with respect to physical or economic or social characteristics. That the country is still a single political unit in indeed creditworthy, but this also sometimes misleads people to be oblivious of the wide social divergences within the country. The four states of the country (Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh) form one such region, where both social and economic progress has been the least. Surprisingly, the linguistic base of all these four states is Hindi which is the national language of India. For any major improvement in the literacy rates in India, the literacy programmes needed to be most successful here; but unfortunately, the actual performance there has left much to be desired. As mentioned before, between 1991 and 1997, the region has performed better than the national average, but these states are still the least literate states of India. One should therefore analyse their problem in a separate framework.

Yet another important social characteristics of the Hindi-speaking States is the large percentage of scheduled tribes in their population. Of the four major Hindi-speaking States, Uttar Pradesh does not have this problem; but Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan together account for nearly 40 per cent of the total tribal population in India, although, for the general population, their share is only about 25 per cent. Apart from the low literacy rates among the tribes, relative social isolation of these people as well as their linguistic background pose several constraints on literacy programmes among them.

Considerable amount of pre-campaign planning has been done by NLM to outline the basic design and strategy of literacy programmes in the country. The campaign in each district also enjoys the direct financial support of NLM, making it free of any resource constraint. However, this does not mean that operational difficulties of literacy campaigns are completely taken care of by such planning and financial support. Regions which are relatively more backward (like the Hindi-heartland) face some additional problems for which separate strategies need to be identified.

Consider, for example, the fact that the existing literacy rates in most of the Hindi-speaking region is very low. This has two important implication for the literacy programmes – first, the number of illiterates is much larger and second, the number of literates who are prospective VT’s (Voluntary Teachers) is much smaller. If we note that in low-literacy areas, the gender-disparity in literacy is higher (i.e., a very large part of the illiterates is all women), then this problem of finding adequate VT’s to run the literacy campaign becomes even more serious. Quite often, this results in insufficiently educated persons being put in charge of learning centres, causing low literacy achievements. Compared to literacy in States such as Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim, the literacy levels plummets in Bihar. While the literacy rate in Bihar is 38.5 per cent, it is only 26.8 per cent amongst tribal. Between tribal male and female, it is 38.4 per cent and 14.8 per cent. The female literacy among certain tribes such as Baiga (1.0 per cent), Birjia (1.9 per cent) Kora (1.5 percent), Korwa (1.9 percent) is practically nil.

In a general sense, the pedagogic problems of adult education are no different in Hindi-speaking area and elsewhere. But one of the common problems of adult literacy is that adult learners would generally expect immediate and substantial benefits accruing to them once they become literate. The extent to which such expectations are fulfilled, however, depends not on the literacy programme itself but on the social, and more importantly the economic, environment in which the learners live. The four Hindi-speaking States, as is well known, are not only socially but even economically backward and the neo-literates here thus find much less opportunity to utilise their newly acquired skills to bring them some material benefit. Understandably, the NLM is aware of this particular problem of literacy programmes and has advised the Zilla Saksharata Samities to forge adequate links between literacy and various government-sponsored income generating activities. But establishment of such links has rarely been attempted and the absence of such links has affected the literacy programmes in economically poor Hindi-speaking States far more than elsewhere.

The above problems of literacy movements in the Hindi-speaking States are generally external in character. The lowness of existing literacy rates, the absence of a value system which accords education a place of pride or the basically stagnant nature of the economy are all beyond the purview of change in near future, even less so by the NLM. But there are certain other obstacles that are internal to the functioning of NLM. The nature of NGOs, executing the literacy programmes, is one such factor. Two of the States in India where literacy programmes had shown good progress are Kerala and West Bengal. In both these States, the ZSS’s function in a fairly autonomous manner – in Kerala because of KSSP and in West Bengal, because of Panchayats. In many other parts of India also, the successful TLC’s have generally been found to be executed by NGO’s which, besides being formally non-government, are also a NGO proper in the sense that they enjoy an element of enlightened voluntarism and have the requisite organisational strength to act as autonomous units. In Bihar also literacy movement way back in 1938-39 acquired the character of mass movement because it was integrated with the national movement. This fabrication of national movement and literacy was undertaken by Dr. Syed Mahmud, the then Hon. Education Minister of Bihar. The usual pattern in most of the Hindi-speaking areas is the ZSS’s which are very often ‘created’ by the district level administration and, consequently, are too dependent on the Collector’s office to display adequate commitment or innovation. For many of these ZSS’s, the literacy programme are probably their first effort in grassroot level development activity and the inexperience always shows in their performance. To what extent, thus, it is justified to expect that ‘Ernakulam Model’ could be replicated in a backward districts of the Hindi Heartland. When Literacy campaign was launched there, its literacy rate was one of the highest in the country (76.82 per cent). It was one of the most urbanised district of Kerala as per the 1981 census. The Mass Movement for illiteracy eradication was sponsored by KSSP. The overall coordination was entrusted to the District collector, Mr. Mr. K.R. Rajan, who also happened to be the Vice-President of KSSP. Apart from a literacy friendly Government, Kerala has a history of a more than century of a social movement.

For quite some time, the literacy functionaries in the Hindi-speaking States have been discussing the special problem of literacy programmes in their respective areas. The above discussion reflects only a part of the collective experience on the issue. Reasons behind limited success of TLC are probably many and unless continuous evaluations and analyses are made to identify those causes, future efforts in TLC would continue to generate results far below the expected. Understandably, the most appropriate level of both evaluation and analysis is the district which indeed is the project unit for TLC’s. But there is also a necessity of aggregating such analyses at State, region and national level to lend it a wider theoretical framework and then hopefully derive from it some conclusions of strategic importance.

V. CONCLUSION

Notwithstanding the enormous expansion of adult education, nonformal and elementary education in India, the problem of illiteracy has been lingering on. It is both colossal and complex given the size of the country, its huge population, wide regional and gender disparities, economic and other cultural factors such as poverty, communalism, casteism etc. Illiteracy in India persists due to a number of factors. If the prevalence of casteism had denied access to literacy to the lower castes since ancient times, the educational policies of the colonial rules were also not conducive to the spread of education among the masses during modern period.

With the adoption of social welfare model of development by the Indian Constitution in 1950’s, adult education became the legitimate concern of the Government of India. The progress and prospects of adult education in India, however, depended on the degree of interest shown by the key persons, viz, Education Ministers of Central Government, senior bureaucrats and eminent adult educators.

After the proclamation of an exclusive policy statement on adult education in 1978, the status of adult education in India began to change. The policy support given during late 1970’s was reiterated by the National Policy on Education enunciated in 1986 and modified in 1992. The launching of the National Literacy Mission in 1988 gave a further fillip to adult education programmes in the country. The main task of defining the policy parameters, designing the programme package and providing funds rested with the Government of India. In evolving adult education policies and programmes, the Government of India invariably sought the cooperation of professionals and non-Governmental organisations as members of various committees and working groups setup from time to time. In the implementation of programme, it seems that Government of India have consistently but cautiously encouraged the participation of NGO’s. Starting with a 50 per cent recurring grant to NGOs in 1950’s, the Government of India have switched over to the policy of seeking their active co-operation after the proclamation of adult education policy in 1978. With the launching of the Seventh Five Year Plan and the National Literacy Mission, the Government of India, started providing hundred per cent programme grants to NGOs, and considered them as "partners in literacy programme". These policy changes have also encouraged the participation of students and other members of society in literacy programme. With the successful operationalisation of Total Literacy Campaigns in several parts of India during 1990s, there has been tremendous increase in the awareness among all sections of society in literacy thereby transforming the character of adult education into a mass movement. Though the process of change of character of adult education has been slow, the trend indicates that Indian adult education is gradually shedding its character as an exclusive government programme and shaping up people’s programme.

References