The millennium development goals have dominated the global progress agenda since 2000. The United Nations has already started a search for post-MDGs development agenda with the 2015 deadline approaching for achieving of the goals.
Despite the relative progress that India and China have been credited with making in achieving the eight MDGs, a lot more needs to be done on all fronts. The London meeting on deciding the post-MDGs agenda, hosted by Prime Minister David Cameron, is yet to finalise what will replace MDGs, but the focus will be on eradicating absolute poverty. The next few months will be vital in deciding the post-2015 development goals.
India has seen major advances in achieving universal primary education, which means that almost all, or 96.7 per cent, children, in the age group of 6 to 14 years, are enrolled in school. However, education experts now want the focus to shift from enrolment to the quality of learning being imparted in schools.
“We have achieved the enrolment goals in India as some 96.7 per cent of India’s children, in the age group of 6 to 14 years, are enrolled in school. But the important thing is to focus on what are children learning. I don’t know what it is like in China, but certainly in India we have a long way to go,” says Dr Rukmini Banerji, Indian education charity Pratham’s director of programmes, who was in London to attend the three-day London meeting hosted by the UK government to develop a strategy to end poverty and decide on the post-MDGs goals.
She participated in the session on transparency and accountability.
“If there is a new goal on education, it must be focused squarely on learning. Enrolment is high and is growing and everybody knows how to make enrolment higher,” Dr Banerji says, adding that whether it is a global goal or not, India must adopt that as a goal.
The focus has to be basic learning outcomes, she explains. “If half our children are completing primary schooling without knowing how to read, that’s the end for these children whether they stay on in school or drop out. The entire effort and expenditure on getting children to school gets washed out if they don’t learn properly.”
Achieving the primary education MDG does not mean anything, says Dr Banerji, who will next week give a short lecture on “How can India realise the potential of its demographic dividend through education?” in London.
The main reason for dropping out of schooling given by children is they are “not interested,” rather than poverty, she says. “That is connected with the quality of education- even if you are sitting in the class and not gaining anything, what’s the point. The numbers are very stark in India, in fifth standard 50 per cent of Indian children cannot read what they should have been reading in Class 2,” says Dr Banerji, who also heads Pratham’s annual status of education report.
The Indian government’s expenditure on elementary education has increased almost by double in the last five years as the government also charges a 2 per cent education cess from all taxpayers.
The Right to Education law in India says that every child should get eight years of schooling, but does not lay down parameters of quality and what kind of learning the children must acquire. “That is a problem as in any framework more things that lead to clearer goals, the more chances are the efforts to achieve that goal are aligned,” says Dr Banerji.
The main challenge for India is how to bring about huge and permanent change in a sustained way over a long period of time, says Dr Banerji. “Media has an important role to play in this — to learn to read you need reading material. Only 20 per cent of children in rural India have anything to read in their homes apart from their school books. If you are learning to read then you need new and easy things to read and this is where newspapers can help,” she explains.
Rather than planning campaigns to build schools, which the government is doing anyway, we need easy, simple and cheap reading material, produced periodically, which will help children maintain their learning, she adds. “Education campaigns have to push the frontiers, rather than focus on last century’s issues.”