Keep the focus on schools

...[A] national report on the status of elementary education, prepared by NGO Pratham, has shown that enrolment figures of children, between 6 and 14 years of age (this corresponds to Class I - Class VIII), have not improved.

In fact, these have dipped — with 6.8 per cent of these children not in school in 2006 as compared to 6.5% the previous year.

From Shubhajit Roy's report in the Indian Express. The horror is masked by that sterile figure of 6.8 percent (of the 6-14 age cohort); it translates to about 11 to 13 million kids!

Pratham's website is here. Their 2006 survey results will be released today. Pratham's report of their large scale survey in 2005 is available here. My post with links to some of the media stories on that report is here.