India’s low ranking in international literacy league tables reflects a gross betrayal by the Central and state governments, bureaucrats, principals and teachers of the lofty national “each one teach one” mission announced way back in 1988. Clearly, the country’s children are not getting the education they deserve.

The United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) defines literacy as the ability to identify, understand, interpret, create, communicate and compute using printed and written materials in various contexts. Put simply, it is the ability to derive meaning from critical appreciation of any material.

The Unesco Institute of Statistics 2012 study of 41 countries makes dismal reading, indicating that India hosts the largest number of illiterate adults worldwide, peaking at 287 million, and a modest improvement to 266 million is predicted by 2015. Official data of the Union government pertaining to 2011 shows only 74 percent of the Indian population is literate. Against this, the CIA World Factbook and national self-reported data estimates indicate that the global literacy average is 84 percent. Even less industrialised countries, such as Vietnam (94 percent) and Zambia (81 percent) report higher adult literacy than India. Moreover, reports of the UN Education for All Global Monitoring Report 2010 and India’s National Curriculum Framework (NCF) 2009 indicate that schools with poor resources, low female literacy rates (65 percent comp-ared with 82 percent for men), indifferent teaching and chronic teacher absenteeism estimated at 25 percent, are the main causes. Poor quality of teachers and teaching is the common thread of all reports.

Quite obviously NCF’s call for significant changes in standards of teacher selection, training, appraisal and evaluation, appears to have fallen on deaf ears. Nobel laureate and economist Amartya Sen’s trenchant comment in 2008 on BBC Radio that India could be moving in the direction of being half California and half sub-Saharan Africa if its IT surges but literacy levels limp along, is still valid.

As a member nation of ASEAN (Association of South-east Asian Nations), India can benefit from sharing literacy programmes with Australia as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2012 — in which India did not participate — ranks Australia #7 of 96 OECD and non-OECD countries.

To tackle the complex issue of raising aboriginal literacy levels in New South Wales, its auditor-general Peter Achterstraat approved funding for 50 ‘instructional leaders’ to provide models for teachers in schools with low levels of literacy and poor learning outcomes. Teachers are drilled in collecting and analysing data to plan programmes, monitor students’ progress, provide after-school free tuition and ensure student attendance.

Moreover to motivate children at an early age and intercept literacy problems, prime minister Julia Gillard has allocated $1 billion (Rs.5,775 crore) this year for a ‘reading blitz’ directed at preschool children for a literacy programme titled Making Up For Lost Time in Literacy (MultiLit), developed by Macquarie University, Sydney.

In the PISA 2012 report, its authors suggest how savvy teachers can improve literacy by working with parents as in New Zealand and Australia. Hard evidence shows that children are motivated and become curious when parents read to them in early childhood, tell them stories, discuss books, television programmes or social issues. Such children show higher reading scores by more than one-and-a-half years over children whose parents neglect personal interaction. My research of 15 years shows that when students are given scaffolds or structures, it makes a significant difference in shaping them into independent learners with problem-solving capabilities.

Down under in Australia, the culture of independent education and self-learning is strongly rooted with even kindergarten children engaging in learning through iPads, tablets and touch screens, with teachers transforming into supervisors. Moreover, every school has a literacy plan and is given rigorous targets with classes closely monitored by teachers and state education departments. Curriculum changes are continually made to benefit every child, classes and entire schools. The plan determines how school finances are deployed and the in-service training teachers receive.

I believe that if India’s literacy levels are to rise to world standards, a major mindset change is required with schools and teams of teachers forming networks, engaging in online learning and meeting to exchange resources and ideas. Moreover, when the Central and state governments fund and support adult literacy programmes in addition to primary education, literacy levels of 95-100 percent can be achieved as they have been in Kerala, Mizoram and Himachal Pradesh. If India is to emerge as an economic power, it must first win the literacy and education race.

Indeed if teachers are to realise the potential of India’s children, they themselves need to ‘go back to school’ to become upskilled in teaching students to move from learning to read to the desideratum of reading to learn.

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(Lionel Cranenburgh taught English at Baldwin Boys, Bangalore and currently heads Shannon Quest, a Western Australia-based careers education company)