India 50 years behind on education goals, says UN report

NEW DELHI: India will be half a century late in achieving its universal education goals, according to a Unesco report released on Monday. This means the country will achieve universal primary education by 2050, universal lower secondary education in 2060 and universal upper secondary education in 2085.

The 2030 deadline for achieving sustainable development goals will be possible only if India introduces fundamental changes in the education sector, the Global Education Monitoring (GEM) report says.

The report says over 60 million children in India receive little or no formal education and the country has over 11.1 million out-of-school students in the lower secondary level, the highest in the world.

At the upper secondary level, 46.8 million are out of school, while 2.9 million students do not even attend primary school. The report says that by 2020 there will be a shortage of 40 million workers with tertiary education.

GEM report director Aaron Benavot told TOI , "Striving for development will mean little without a healthy planet. So, the new 2030 agenda for sustainable development unites global development and environmental goals."

The report says 40% of students worldwide are taught in a language they don't understand. While the curriculums of half of the countries do not explicitly mention climate change, in India some 300 million students currently receive environmental education.