100% literacy for India by 2020

If India is to become a developed state, and get respected in the world, one of the requirements which is easier to achieve is 100% literacy. No country can become great, developed unless its people are literate and function as effective citizens. As PM, Vajpayee has proposed this literacy as his vision in his independence day address in 1999. It can be achieved within 3 years by 2020 by making it as a national mission, have policy direction, making all citizens participate and drive it.

I am hoping PM, Finance Minister and HRD minister can make policy directions and budgetary allocations for this starting from 2018. It is not just an HRD education task, it can be a task for tribal development, minorities welfare, women welfare, rural development, urban development, schedule castes development. Literacy is not just limited to very rudimentary, reading and writing. It can be extended to reading, writing, basic maths, environmental literacy, health science literacy (inclusive public health, nutrition), social studies/citizenship literacy (inclusive cleanliness). In this task elementary/high school teachers can be included, high school students/college students can be included, retired teachers can be included. Without affecting daily tasks of adults and children, only evenings/nights an hour every day and 2 hours in the day time for 60-90 days in Summers can be used. In republic day or mann ki bath PM can reiterate this as a national vision and invite all citizens to participate.

In each village and urban locality, we can identify all the adults who need to be made literate, identify potential persons who can help them most naturally, identify volunteer coordinators, provide online, mobile apps, booklets its materials, assign/allocate supervisor/monitoring tasks to local Panchayat, municipal, district level officials. All of this can be tracked online digital mode.