As part of the second phase of the campaign, about 60 District Education Offices launched the drive for enrolling illiterate people of 15-60 age group on Saturday. The rest districts -- a majority of them are located in the mountainous region -- are expected to start the campaign by May. [break]
The second phase of the campaign aims at making 1,210,560 people literate by enrolling them in schools within four months. IEC has mobilized 43,059 volunteers in 75 districts to carry out the campaign, for which the government has allotted Rs 1.04 billion.
According to a labor survey conducted by the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) in 2009, over 7 million people above six years of age are illiterate. It put literacy rate at 63 per cent. The government aims at making primary education accessible to all children by the end of 2015.
Amidst widespread criticism that the government failed to make the first ever campaign a grand success last year, IEC has promised not to repeat past mistakes again. “We have learnt quite a lot from last year´s experience,” Gopal Bhattarai, deputy director of IEC, said. “We are committed to meet the target and reduce the dropout rate this year.”
Local government bodies, as deputy director Bhattarai points out, were bestowed with the entire responsibility of conducting the campaign last year, which resulted in the exclusion of local people. “We failed to realize that local bodies cannot function properly in the absence of local representatives,” he said. “Those government employees who run local bodies showed apathy to the campaign.”
In a bid to avoid past mistakes, IEC has endowed the responsibility of organizing the campaign this year mainly on DEOs under the direct supervision of five Regional Education Directorates (REDs). “Local bodies will work only on the back front this time,” Bhattarai said. IEC has mobilized 800 community study centers, headmasters of over 25,000 schools and local leaders of political parties to ensure local people´s participation in the campaign.
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