– Rahul Singh is a former editor of Reader’s Digest and Indian Express and consultant to the United Nations AT THE START OF A NEW YEAR, commentators often put forward their priorities for accelerated national development. Mine is centred on two sectors of the economy that have been foolishly neglected for the past 66 years since independence. I believe the golden keys not just of India’s development, but for the development of all countries, are health and primary education. While writing a book on population for the United Nations (Family Planning Success Stories, 1994) I found that population growth had been stabilised only by those developing countries which had attained progress in these two vital sectors. India has not exhibited adequate progress in primary education and health and is saddled with unsustainable population growth which has severely hampered its national development effort. The main criterion for measuring national health is the longevity or the average life span of its people. At the time of independence, the average Indian could expect to live until her mid-30s. Today, thanks largely to the virtual eradication of mass killer diseases such as malaria, cholera, polio and tuberculosis, and drop in infant and maternal mortality, the average Indian can expect to live to her mid-60s. However, many other developing countries whose public healthcare systems were worse than ours seven decades ago, enjoy longer average life spans. An average Chinese, South Korean, Indonesian, Malay, even a Sri Lankan, live 10-15 years longer, thanks mainly to better public sanitation and healthcare. In the education sector as well, successive governments at the Centre and in the states have sadly neglected vitally important primary education. According to the latest (January 2014) ninth Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), a survey of primary education in 562 districts of rural India, 96.7 percent of children in the age group 6-14 are enrolled in primary school. That seems like good news. Unfortunately, it isn’t. Despite levying a special cess to fund education and enacting a law to ensure access to elementary education for all children, the Central government has not succeeded in improving learning outcomes in India’s rural schools, says Pratham, the highly respected NGO which conducts this annual survey. “Proportion of all children in class V who can read a class II text remains at 47 percent. Among class V children enrolled in government schools, the percentage able to read class II level text decreased from 50.3 percent (2009) to 43.8 percent (2011) to 41.1 percent (2013),” comment the authors of ASER 2013. “The same holds true for students’ ability to handle basic math problems,” they add. ASER 2013 confirms that while there’s been a decline in learning standards in rural government schools, learning outcomes in rural private primaries have improved, resulting in private school enrollment rising from 18.7 percent in 2006 to 29 percent in 2013. In other words, almost one-third of Indian children are now in private schools. Although declining, an alarming number of children — over 40 percent…
