A worthy gift

Recently finished Amartya Sen's "The Argumentative Indian". I really liked the book and Dr Sen's style of thought and writing. Will surely be reading more of his works in the future.

One of the most interesting essays in a book full of excellent pieces was the one on sexual discrimination. I was surprised to read that the variable most correlated to the fertility rate of a state/country is its female literacy rate. Most other variables are like per capita income, general literacy rate, GDP growth rate,urbanisation rate are not even significantly related. Even the female labour force participation rate is not as important as the female literacy rate. One of the most serious problems plaguing India is population growth that is poised to make it the most populous country in the world within a couple of decades. Yet Sen's thesis suggests that a concerted effort to educate every girl child in the country now would bring fertility below replacement rates by 2030 or 2035. Needless to say, even apart from this, improving the educational attainment of girls (and boys) will bring immense benefits to the country, and this is a goal that should be priority number 1.

Where India lost the plot in focussing on primary education is unclear to me, but the fact that after 60 years of independence, we have barely touched 75% literacy, is a disaster. If only the government had decided to focus all of its efforts into running schools instead of running banks, oil refineries, bread making units, airlines and what not; if only the government had deployed its best civil servants as teachers and school administrators instead of wasting them as managers of PSUs; if only the government had spent tax revenues into building classrooms and science labs in the least acccessible villages, instead of subsidising LPG for the relatively well-off middle classes...if only.

Every government has paid lip service to education of course. The present government has not performed too badly - the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan has improved school enrollment rates among children (though droput rates among secondary school are still alarmingly high), and the midday meal scheme is helping right another wrong inflicted upon our nation's children - their abysmally high malnutrition rates. But I wish the campaign for universal literacy is taken up on a warfooting. We are trustees for our nation's future, I believe, and there are few better gifts we can bequeath to the future than a fully literate generation of Indians.