Illiteracy is our biggest challenge

It is very important to make all of our children to make them read written text, write or recognize numbers. Our biggest challenge ahead is illiteracy. Is "Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan" the right platform to fight the illiteracy problem of our country at the ground level??? Is the Pratham's report on the Annual Status of Education on rural India reliable??? The Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan is no doubt, another step to fight our biggest challenge, but it is not implementing properly. The SSA has promised us to provide useful and relevant elementary education for all children in the 6 to 14 age group by 2010 in India. The recent survey of Pratham covered only 564 districts, 16198 villages and 3.35 lakh households whereas the country has more than that, say approximately 500,000 villages. Department of School Education and Literacy launches "Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan" with great promise to universalize elementary education by community-ownership of the school system in India. As promised, it should be able to provide quality basic education all over the country under any circumstances. We are expecting from Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan programme that they will do their best in improving the capabilities to all children, through their provision of community-owned quality education in a mission mode. For a better tomorrow, we need not compromise today.