New Delhi: Despite "slow but significant progress" achieved in the 1990s, gender parity in education for girls remains a distant prospect in several countries including India, says a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) report.

South and West Asia, a region that is home to three of the world's nine most populous developing countries – India, Pakistan and Bangladesh – though made notable progress at nearly all levels of education, realising the goal of Education For All (EFA) remains a major challenge and substantial gender disparities persisted, said UNESCO's 'Global Monitoring Report' for 2003/04 released today (Nov 6).

Observing that girls continue to face "sharp discrimination in access to schooling", it said two-thirds of out-of-school children are girls (21 million) and the region has the greatest gender disparities in primary education of any, with a female-male enrolment ratio (GPI) of only 0.84. Very large disparities are found in Pakistan (0.74), followed by India (0.83) and Nepal (0.85).

When told that the figures taken by UNESCO were two years old and India had taken several initiatives like 'Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan' to boost education, Christopher Colclough, director of the Report said, "At the moment in terms of the 2000 figures, India is quite some way behind many other countries, even behind Bangladesh, in gender parity.

"India has demonstrated its commitment and its policy has been changed in the right direction," Colclough said adding that India has done a lot in the last two years.

The report said forecasts based on past trends showed that India and Bangladesh are likely to miss reaching gender parity goals by 2015 and policies are or can be put in place to enable the pace of progress to accelerate.

In China, the most populous country in the world, boys will continue to outnumber girls in secondary schools for many years to come.

"Gender parity in education is a priority not only because inequality is a major infringement of fundamental human rights, but because it represents an important obstacle to social and economic development," UNESCO Director General Koichiro Matsuura said in a message.

Gender equality in education is one of the six goals of the EFA programme endorsed by 164 Governments at the World Education Forum in Dakar in 2000. As a first step to achieving equality, the countries set the target of 2005 to achieve gender parity (equal enrolment of boys and girls) in primary and secondary education.

PTI