India

The result of the meeting was the New Delhi Commitment, which aims for ‘inclusive, relevant [and] quality education for all’. The E9 countries make up 54 per cent of the global population, but account for 42.3 per cent of the world’s out-of-school children, 58 per cent of the world’s illiterate youth, and 67 per cent of the world’s illiterate adults. As such, education policy is of great importance to the group of nations.

India has made huge progress in one of the areas above, having reduced the number of out-of-school children from 20 million in 2002 to four million in 2008–09. The improvements are largely due to the ‘Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan’ (Universalization of Elementary Education) program launched in 2001, and the Midday Meal Scheme, mandated by the Supreme Court of India in the same year, in which meals are provided at school. In a nation where 68.7 per cent of the population lives on less than US$2 per day, and 32.7 per cent lives on less than US$1.25 per day, such programs have led to tremendous improvements, both in increasing enrolments and reducing drop-out rates, as well as in reducing hunger and malnourishment among children.

But this does not mean India has adequately addressed education quality.

Progress on the number of students enrolled in education, in particular given India’s very young population, is laudable. But as researchers have time and again pointed out, it has led to a situation where ‘there are even more who are enrolled, but learning little’. Increased access to education has led to reduced efficiency, which detracts from the noble objective of ‘quality education for all’ adopted by the E9 nations.

The definition of literacy and education has of course progressed from a standard of barely being able to read and write; a more inclusive definition now calls for any literate person to have the ‘ability to read for knowledge, write coherently, and think critically about the written word’, which essentially means the ability to...