India Calling
After 59 years of sovereign existence, India stands on the anvil of a major transition. Experts around the world expect India to zoom ahead on the path of economic development and prosperity. It is indeed a proud moment for all Indians, when they stand witness to history being made on the global forum and it is being penned by India. The overall semblance of the country is indeed a happy one. The diversity encapsulated in the Indian populace on account to backgrounds, religion, perspectives and Indian-ness it self seems to have given a multichromatic façade to the Indian portrait of 2008.
Indians are aware that there country is progressing and running fast towards prosperity, but a vital question emerges that am I actually an Indian. Is being an Indian all about analysing the country from the state of my, town, state or region. Is my view, which is constrained by inexplicable myopia of ignorance, good enough to describe the state of a country that shelters 1.12 Billion lives? The answer as I see it is a resounding “NO”. It shall be more appropriate if I mention some resounding statistics in order to accentuate the extent of deprivation and ignorance that coexists with the majestic growth story of the country. I shall take one sector each week and present the state of affairs through statistics and inferences.
Lets start with Education
State of Education in India
Literacy Rate-65.4%
Female Literacy Rate-54.2
Primary Schools -6,15,700
Middle Schools-2,09,600
Higher Secondary Schools-1,25,300
Colleges-8,361
Professional Colleges-2340
Universities-304
•With a total of around 6,27000 villages and 6,15,000 primary schools, not much remains unsaid about the state of primary education and the urgent need of focusing on building more schools in rural India.
•On an average every one of the University must be able to attend to more than 3, 00,000 students in order to cater to the population between the age group of 19-24. Not even the most advanced universities of the world can be expected to do so.
•The Knowledge commission has been mentioning time and over again about building rural India the breeding ground for the intellectual capital of tomorrow’ India, but the government has been unscrupulously busy with more politically sensitive issues of reservation.
•With an educatable population of more than 355 million, the initiatives of the government are like throwing peas on a window pane.
These figures and facts call for us so called progressive and proud Indians to wake up from our slumber and think of some innovative methods for supporting the future of this country we call home.
