Cairo: India today (Dec 20, 2003) said that concerns of the nine populous countries (E-9) should be addressed to make progress towards achieving the goal of Education For All (EFA).

"The importance of E-9 seems to be somewhat diminishing in the eyes of international organisations, who seem to forget that for any substantial progress towards EFA, concerns of these nine countries would have to be addressed," Human Resource Development Minister Murli Manohar Joshi said, addressing the E-9 Ministerial Review Meeting on Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) in Cairo.

Regretting that all E-9 countries were not automatically invited to meetings of the High Level Group (HLG) for monitoring progress towards EFA, Joshi said these countries should be closely involved in preparation of the global monitoring report for EFA. This would make the report more meaningful and useful.

The E-9 group comprises India, Egypt, China, Mexico, Brazil, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria and Indonesia.

Joshi said that the E-9 countries were also given a "go by" by the global funding agencies on the Fast Track Initiative (FTI), with none of the E-9 countries finding a place in the list of 18 countries selected for funding in the first instance.

"These 18 countries constitute only 18 million of the estimated 113 million children out of school," Joshi said, adding that the emphasis should be on targeting fund flow at countries where they were needed the most and not merely on increasing the number of countries where funds had been pledged.

"We not only need to make the FTI better targeted but also expeditious. It is also necessary to take care to see that external funding respects individual country's development priorities, and there is no imposition of unwanted conditionalities," he said.

On the progress made by India in the field of education, he said nineties saw a dramatic improvement with literacy rate going up from 18 per cent in 1951 to over 65 per cent in 2001.

For the first time since India became independent, there has been a decline in the absolute numbers of non-literate population from about 32 million in 1991 to about 29 million in 2001 in spite of increasing population, he said adding, "We have still to cover considerable ground before we achieve EFA goals."

PTI