SPEECH BY SHRI K. R. NARAYANAN, PRESIDENT OF INDIA, AT THE 31 ST ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATIONS OF INTERNATIONAL LITERACY DAY.

NEW DELHI, MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 1997

It is a strange paradox that India with its high intellectual and philosophical traditions had for centuries its teeming masses steeped in illiteracy and ignorance. We have often explained this paradox by the defensive and elitist argument that "when the wick is ablaze at the top the whole lamp is said to be burning", as one great Indian scholar put it. If there was an area of darkness under the lamp it did not seem to affect the shining glory of the civilization. Poet Rabindranath Tagore once retorted by the pungent observation that, "the masses are everywhere unreconciled to being the lampstand of civilization". There have been movements on behalf of and by the unlettered masses in India for liberation from ignorance.

The preaching of Gautama the Buddha in the language of the people in order to spread the light of 'dharma' among the common folk, was one of the earliest exercises in this. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there arose in different parts of India social and religious reformers - Swami Vivekananda, Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Ishwar Chander Vidya Sagar, the Tagores, Mahatma Phule, Babu Rao Patil, the great Sikh Gurus, Sree Narayana Guru and a host of others who worked with crusading zeal for the social transformation of India and the spread of education among the people. Over a hundred years ago Swami Vivekananda said that "the chief cause of India's ruin has been the monopolising of the whole of education and the intelligence of the land . . . among a handful of men". If that has been the chief cause of India's decline in the past, the main obstacle to-day to India's development and progress remains the same namely, illiteracy and ignorance among the common people.

Mahatma Gandhi realised this truth in the midst of our freedom struggle and made the removal of illiteracy a major plank in his constructive programme. After Independence Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and his colleagues had launched programmes for mass education for the elimination of illiteracy. Indeed we experimented in different systems and methods of education including a version of the Gandhian system of basic education. More recently we introduced technology missions for education and currently we are engaged in a massive programme of Total Literacy.

Above all, we had a constitutional commitment to provide universal compulsory schooling for boys and girls between the age of 6 to 14. To-day we are planning to make this a fundamental right of the people. We can claim that we have made partial success in regard to these commitments and objectives. The rate of literacy has risen from 20% at the time of Independence to 52% to-day. This is no mean achievement. But it is far behind the targets we have placed before the nation, and we are behind other developing countries, even behind the sub-Saharan countries of Africa. We have to think hard about this failure of ours.

We have to make an agonising re-appraisal of our policies, programmes and performance in the field of primary education. Somewhere there was a paralysis of political will, and even more than that the implementation was halting, inefficient, ineffective and perhaps often obstructive of the main purpose. For a social and psychological reason for this, one may have to go back to the tradition of monopolising education in a few hands which was pointed out by Vivekananda. We know that in olden days women and the lower castes were prohibited from learning the Vedas and the Shastras. Even in more recent times, Dr.B.R. Ambedkar has recorded that how he wanted to take Sanskrit as a subject while he was at the Elphinstone College, Bombay and how he was denied permission to study the language, even though by his own efforts he studied the language and acquired proficiency in Sanskrit. It may be that this old tradition is still lingering in our psyche and preventing the spread of literacy and education among

The common people. It may be that a certain fear of universalisation of education is lurking in the minds of sections of the ruling and implementing classes and agencies. For, who are the illiterates in India? First of all, they are women of all classes and castes, especially, the women of the lower classes. Secondly, there are men and women belonging to the minority communities, scheduled castes and tribes and of the backward and deprived sections of our society. It is precisely among these sections and classes of our society that literacy is at the lowest and the phenomenon of poverty is at its acutest. Therefore, our strategy for universal primary education must be directed at these immense deprived sections of our society and taking into account their special circumstances and problems. In India there is also the peculiar situation of the orthodox belonging to the upper classes shunning the facilities of public education that is actually available to them because of outmoded social customs. We have to provide special incentives to draw them out into the process of education.

In our country nearly 350 million people are illiterate. We have the disgraceful distinction of having the largest number of illiterates in the world. The cost of providing facilities for this immense number of people for elementary education is considerable. But it is an indispensable investment in human development which is the basis of all economic and material development.

If we look at education from this point of view we would not hesitate to increase our expenditure in education to a more significant proportion of our national resources. Indeed this is the experience of the rest of the world, particularly that of the so called "Tigers" of Asia. Conscious of this the Government of India has announced that it would increase spending on education to 6% of the GNP from the current 3.9% .

The problem of mass literacy in a country with 350 million illiterates is a highly complicated and gigantic one. It cannot be achieved within the time frame that we have in mind without extra-ordinary measures and involving the community. It is amazing that more than a hundred years ago Swami Vivekananda had anticipated some of the problems that we are encountering to-day. He wrote once: " Suppose you start schools all over India for the poor, still you cannot educate them for the poverty in India is such that the poor boys would rather go to help their fathers in the fields or otherwise try to make a living than come to school. But if the mountain does not go to Mohammed, then Mohammed must go to the mountain.

If the poor boy cannot come to education, education must go to him". This is precisely the problem we are facing with regard to elementary education for girls and boys of the poorer classes who have to work in order to eke out a living for their families. The curse of child labour can be removed from this country only through education. Indeed literacy is the answer to mass poverty and not the other way round. To achieve this, as Swami Vivekananda said, we have to take literacy and education to where the people live and work, to the fields, to the factories, to where the tiller is tilling, the pathmaker is breaking stones, to the slums of our cities, to the building sites where the migrant labour is at work. And special incentives like mid-day meals in schools, and economic incentives to girls in rural areas that we are providing to-day must be extended.

Above all, a mass literacy movement to which sanitation, health awareness, etc., must be added, has to be launched in the country. There are nearly four and a half million teachers in our primary, secondary and higher secondary schools. They must be induced to participate in this mass campaign. In addition from the large army of the educated unemployed we can draw people for a literacy campaign. It may be recalled that Gandhiji once advocated conscription of teachers for educating the masses. We have, besides, more than 10 million civil servants in our

Country and they could be induced to devote part of their time to the literacy campaign, and in addition private industries and public enterprises and our innumerable temples and religious institutions could take up literacy and educational service. In all this apart from Central and State governments, voluntary agencies and political parties have a crucial role to play. I have a feeling that in this over-politicized land of ours unless the political parties take up constructive work as essential part of their daily activities, basic tasks like literacy education will not be realised; on the contrary, public attention will be diverted from the basic needs of the people to the froth and bubble of political propaganda and disruptive agitations. Community participation in the literacy movement must be an organised effort with teaching method adapted to a crash programme. It is necessary to make learning a joyful and meaningful process related to the basic needs of life. While University students are brought into this campaign we must ensure that they get credits or marks for the literacy work they do. And modern methods of communications must be adopted in bringing to children and adults the blessings of literacy and general knowledge of the world.

While we decry our general lack of achievement in raising the literacy level of people, we should not ignore the bright spots in the picture. The achievement of 100% literacy and human development to a level equivalent to developed countries by the State of Kerala is a glittering example. As Amartya Sen and Dreze have pointed out "To achieve as much as Kerala has done for a population of its size is no mean record in the world ". The population of Kerala is 30 million equal to that of Canada and more than that of Sri Lanka, Costa Rica, Hong Kong, Singapore etc., countries that are held up as models of educational and human development. It is time our educationists look at the Kerala experience carefully, and also note that Goa, Mizoram, Delhi have attained high levels of literacy and Tamil Nadu and Karnataka are catching up rapidly. In the States of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, West Bengal and Maharashtra also there are bright spots of achievements. I commend particularly the districts of Sikar and Pali in Rajasthan and Sangli in Maharashtra whose achievements have been honoured to-day with the Satyen Maitra Memorial Literacy Award.

Literacy and education, it has been established, is the strategic factor in developing and elevating a society for making its economy more productive and for raising the quality of life of the people. It is the key to raising the health status of the people, for controlling the hitherto uncontrollable growth of population, for drastically reducing infantile mortality, and for ultimately abolishing poverty and raising the quality of life of the people. Let us therefore redouble our efforts to achieve mass literacy by the target date.

Thank you.