by Odemgbe

Created on: February 15, 2008   Last Updated: March 06, 2008

Illiteracy exists every where and is a challenge facing all of humanity regardless of religion, race or ideology. In India, the challenge is a cultural one: the girl child, according to Hindu custom, pays the dowry. This discourages Indian Hindi from providing education for the girl child (they are saving for marriage!) and this anomalous situation is transmitted from generation to generation.

Another factor causing widespread illiteracy is lack of unity: the Hindus hate Muslims, the Muslims hate the Hindus and the Sikhs hate both. This hinders economic growth by reducing economies of scale and businesses can not expand across these divisions. This lack of capacity building scares investors who also contend with lack of penny stock benefits (a major source of revenue for small businesses).With the resultant poor standard of living, the average Indian can not afford to provide the basic educational needs of his children and dependants. This scenario is worsened by the activities of terrorists: in an unsafe environment, investors can not finance the risk because it can not be insured and banks will not be convinced of guaranteed returns. So, the terrorists exploit a situation and it only gets worse for Indians (Muslim and non Muslim) and better for their recruitment services.

The rural areas in India are also a hindrance to development: slums scarcely have the required infrastructure to provide quality education. This discourages the children and youth from educational pursuits and they often take to crime for a living instead. Unfortunately, most Indians reside in these habitations and successive governments have always found it difficult to engage in capacity building in these slums because of the lack of security and the illiteracy itself. The challenge is huge and multifaceted and requires a holistic approach administered with lots of patience.

The educational system has to imitate some of the success stories from across the globe. For instance, the industrial schools system: the British educational system attained its current lofty heights from very humble beginnings. Children had to work in farms and cottage industries given the widespread poverty and illiteracy at the time (1806).Various legislations (Poor Law, Factory Act etc) where passed on how the educational system and the social security system were to be run and the reforms have paid out today. Another success story is cooperative education from the United States of America. This involves the provision of jobs for students at the tertiary level of education while they were still in school. This system enables cheap manpower development and is responsible for the high quality of manpower from the United States.

Indians have to adapt these systems to suit their current social realities and use elearning and correspondence courses for capacity building and tax havens for investors in such projects. This could enable community self help projects and foundations run the program with little or no assistance from the Indian government

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