Title : The Gender Gap in Basic Education Author : Rekha Wazir Published by : SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd M-32 Market, Greater Kailash–I, New Delhi - 110 048 Publication Date : March 2000 Pages : 286 Price : Rs. 225/- (paper back)

The vision of education set out in the Constitution of India in 1951 was: "….the State shall endeavor to provide , within a period of ten years from the commencement of this Constitution, for free and compulsory education for all children until they complete the age of fourteen years."
 
But, even half a century later, this dream has yet to turn into a reality as half of India’s population is still illiterate and nearly 35 million children between the age of 6 to 10 do not go to school. The statistics for female education make even more dismal reading. In 1995, the female literacy rate was 38 percent as against 66 per cent for males. The gender gap at the primary enrolment level was 22 percentage points.
 
All such data on the gender discrimination in the field of education and the probable solutions are presented in a recent book edited by Rekha Wazir, titled "The Gender Gap in Basic Education’. This recent publication by Sage Publications explores the impact of NGOs or Non Government Organizations who have been engaged in the field of formal and non-formal education. The book dwells into the nuances of the innovative and experimental educational programmes run by NGOs, along with their limitations in terms of their limited reach. The accent of the document is on highlighting the varied efforts by the voluntary sector to overcome the gender disadvantage in access to basic education.
 
Rekha Wazir and other authors of this educative publication successfully prove the efficacy of NGOs, in terms of reducing the gender gap and their definite edge over the top-heavy government bureaucracy. The NGOs engaged in this field, however, have a limited reach and merely scaling up of NGO initiatives would not be sufficient. The authors feel that an altogether novel approach is needed to boost up the voluntary educational revolution and involve NGOs in a more productive manner to serve this noble cause.
 
In her essay on the educational status of girls and women, Ratna Sudarshan has tried to unfold the definition of gender-equality. She reveals: "Gender-inequality is difficult to define, partly because it is not quantifiable and partly because manifestation of inequality changes over time. It is therefore difficult to measure".
 
In practice, the attention tends to get focused on the more visible and manageable and measurable manifestations of gender-inequality. According to Ratna Sudarshan, these include gender differentials in health, education an employment, either used on their own as indicators of gender bias, or in combination, as in the indices popularized through the UNDP human Development Report of 1995, the gender-related development index (GDI) and the gender empowerment measure (GEM).
 
However, these indicators are not the only measures of discrimination. Domestic violence, stress and cultural practices of seclusion are all recognized as having a basis in unequal gender relations and a gender differentiated impact on development outcomes.
 
The revealing essays of the book deal with topics like an assessment of girls’ access to schooling; literacy, development and empowerment; child labour and education; identity, exclusion and the education of tribal communities; and NGO strategies.
 
The chapter pertaining to NGO strategies, for example, focuses on NGO strategies for operationalizing change that is appropriate to the Indian context. This essay also analyses the potential and problems in building a partnership between the masses and the private sector.
 
The whole idea of this book is to raise the debate on gender-inequality in the field of education , which is just the tip of the iceberg comprising a host of all other kinds of gender discrimination.
 
All in all, this gender-sensitive document is an eye-opener and a must for all those who believe in education – as if women matter. 

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