A literate South Asia

Written by Tehreem Mahmood • September 2010

The governments and people of South Asia must realize that illiteracy is the single major impediment in their march forward. The cause of mass education for this one-fifth of humanity must be tackled on a war footing.

There are around four billion literate people in the world. The UNESCO aims to make sure that every person living on this planet must be literate enough to communicate properly, both in writing and speech. It was in 1965 that UNESCO for the first time decided to dedicate a day entirely for education. A day to convey every - no matter big or small - information about the happenings in the education related fields around the world to the people. From the year 1966, UNESCO celebrates September 8th as the International Literacy Day in every continent of the world. The day is a celebration where importance of literacy is highlighted across the cultures, nations and societies. During the celebrations strong emphasis is made on the effects of literacy and adult education along with its impacts internationally.

Though all over the world four billion people are literate now, nevertheless the challenges of children, youth and adults education i.e. literacy for all still are unachieved. Rapid growth in population also makes it difficult to control the ratio from literates to illiterates. As some mention it, literacy for all is the biggest ever moving target for a mission most essential. 2-1

The concept of literacy for all is a combination of pulling off determined objectives with ample and parallel efforts, acquiring sufficient resources and designing strategies along with realizing the intricacy and enormity of the task at hand. But putting it in writing and doing it practically is two opposites. It is not really as simple as writing in a combination of words properly. Not all of this is easy to attain concurrently if practically done. This is the reason why UNESCO feels that the people of the world altogether must be addressed on a single day. A day when communities interact. A day when people, all working for education and literacy, can come together and share their experiences, expertise and problems with each other. This helps them overcome many problematic issues and facilitates growth of interactive relationships. These universal gatherings as a consequence make us aware of the number of further efficient labors required in the field of literacy. The conclusions of such meetings also suggest for working on ever changing political will at every other level, i.e. at local, national and international levels.

If we look at figure 1, we would observe the amount spent on education - and literacy that is - and on health and defense sectors by the South Asian countries. The highest money set apart for the education sector is by Bhutan which seems to spend almost nothing on military. But governments of China and Maldives seem to allocate almost nothing to the education sector. This is because the GDP is so high that the amount allocated by the governments hardly shows on the map. Not only these countries have cheapest labor found on this side of the developing world, these two have the highest literacy rates as well. Nonetheless poverty is another challenge to the third world countries and one of the things poverty mostly affects is literacy.

Currently, countries in South Asia have a lot to do for increasing their literacy rates. Starting off with allocating sufficient amount in their budgets, the governments must also make sure that the students, especially the younger generations are getting uniform education. Education and literacy is a right to every citizen. But unfortunately, it is commonly seen in the South Asian countries that citizens are denied equality - both gender vise and standard vise - in education and literacy. Schools are treated more as a business in this portion of the developing world and less as institutions. This is why they set varied education standards, in some cases they address only a particular gender, they are small in sizes and greater in number. Most of the countries have public/government schools but due to issues of quality education, people prefer to send their children to private institutions. These private institutions unlike the public schools demand a huge amount as tuition fees depending on the facilities they provide.

UNESCO raised the banner saying ‘Education for all' in the middle 60s. This has been hard for almost every other country in the South Asian region to provide education for all. Figure 2 shows the portion of population that completes education after grade 5 and the enrollment of sample population in the primary schools in the South Asian countries.

Numbers were not available for Bhutan and Pakistan. Figure 3 the years may vary but it is more or less similar every year. This chart also shows the difference of genders separately who complete education after grade 5. The age group under study is 15 to 19 years old males and females. While the other chart shows the statistics of children overall enrolled for primary education, which is up till grade 5. Both these charts clearly vindicate that the countries have failed where some has miserably failed to provide education to all. The issues of quality of education and uniform education seem secondary here but there are still a lot of people opting for literacy. These people have equal right of getting good education no matter if the governments fail to provide this luxury - called education - to all of their citizens.

The governments and people of the South Asian region must realize that illiteracy could be a real threat to humanity. This is the evil that can be seen around in our daily lives. Illiteracy increases unemployment - in the case of women mostly - while those who even find employment, they usually get low wages for a hard labor. After the global recession and the inflation, it is not difficult to imagine that illiteracy leaves you to survive and not lets you live a life. With a shallow lifestyle, illiteracy also boosts to crime rate in a country. This is a package that comes to those - and most of the people - who intend to improve their lives. Mind you that it is not always improving, for some it is not even lifestyle, it is for sake of their survival that they get caught up in the bog of crime. Most of those who do get education but not as good as other citizens do not get as good jobs as others. This causes the societal classification into upper, lower and middle classes. The more literate a person is, the more logical he gets. Now getting to know that the seemingly smarter person is wrong gives boost to intolerance. On a higher level, tolerance and intolerance of nations depend on the country's literacy rate. And tolerance here is not only academic or social. Tolerance here includes religious tolerance as well. Illiteracy gives birth to the jungle law, survival of the fittest.

South Asian governments must realize the threats posed by illiteracy and major crises can be resolved just by getting to fix one of their key problems. People cannot be denied education once the governments take responsibility to address the issue of literacy and education seriously.