Proud as the NLM must feel, it is worth considering if the Mission should have been around to be so honoured. In this period it was to provide the critical mass that would take India to complete literacy by 2000. After a promising start, the NLM faltered. Today it has become just another department in the HRD Ministry, making steady but hardly spectacular progress. India's literacy rate is growing at a piffling 2 per cent a year.
Population goes up faster.
Nor is this tardy record a reflection of India's poverty. Functional literacy is not a PhD programme. Reports of it being a resource guzzler are grossly exaggerated. Some 50 years ago, a country as poor as Ethiopia undertook a very successful mass literacy programme. Nicaragua and Cuba are other examples.