The government penchant for lofty slogans shows no sign of relenting soon. One area of rhetorical abuse is education. How the education sector of the country has been promised one miracle after another is a common knowledge. Yet our Education Minister. Jamiruddin Sircar would like us to believe that the miracle of all miracles .— i.e. the elimination of illiteracy from the country by the year 2000 — will still materialise. We would indeed be delighted to share the minister's optimism but for the obtaining objective situation in the area.

According to the. Education Minister's own information, the country now smarts under a staggering illiteracy rate — 67.6^per cent above seven years of age to be precise. We are already in the first quarter of 1994 and left with only five-plus years to make literate not only the huge army of illiterate numbering between seven and eight crore, but also the additional number of schoolage children claiming their stake by this time.

On the contrary, going by the government initiative to spread literacy among the population, we fear that a far greater number of illiterate will be cramming this small geographic but densely populated territory. According to education information and the Bureau of Statistics, the number of government primary schools has increased from 36,537 in 1972 to 49,568 by the year 1992. Now the picture that emerges is like this: in 1992, the number of primary school-going children was 17,356,000 and the country had only 49,568 schools. Assuming that each primary school accommodates 250 students on an average, there is a requirement for 69,400 of them. By the year 2000, the number of school-age children will increase to 19,695,000, requiring a total of 78,780 schools. In 1992, there was a shortage of 19.832 schools, the number of which will shoot up to 29,220 by then. A total of about 10,000 non government primary schools are also included in this estimate.

This speaks all for the state of education in the country. But still a comparable study of the investments in education may help. The OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries top the list with a 5.5 per cent of their GNP expenditure on education. South Asia's share is 3.6 per cent as against Bangladesh’s 2 per cent. The Bangladesh Government has done nothing special beyond allocating the so far highest percentage of the GNP — which unfortunately is lower than the Aslan standard — to Improve the situation. The government misses no opportunity to boast Its budget allocation for education, but for a country lagging far behind its neighbours cannot expect to derive any spectacular benefits from this trick-ling-down resources for primary education.