Tomorrow, we will be celebrating Teachers’ Day — on the birthday of our great teacher-president, Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. But our ritualistic honouring of the great profession of educators will do nothing to conceal the fact that, in India, teachers are too often underpaid, under-appreciated and therefore under-motivated. No wonder we have a nationwide shortage of 2.5 million teachers, and several of those who do exist on the rolls, especially in our village pathshalas, don’t actually teach: they show up once a month to collect their government salary and are AWOL the rest of the time.

This is why I applauded the recent announcement by the Varkey GEMS Foundation of a new incentive for Indian teachers to excel — the Guruvar Awards for secondary school teachers, with a first prize of Rs5.1 million for the best schoolteacher in India and several other prizes of Rs2.1 million each. It’s time we recognised the value of teachers with awards that can really make a difference in their lives. After all, teachers are, or should be, the biggest influence on their impressionable charges, at least after the parents. Their impact on young lives is profound and long lasting. They shape the character, curiosity level and intellectual potential of their students. In other words, they help shape our society.

Of all the many paradoxes with which our country abounds, the saddest must be that we are a country where nearly half the population is illiterate but which has produced the world’s second largest pool of trained scientists and engineers. A country which invents more sophisticated software for US computer manufacturers than any other country in the world, and yet, in which there are at least 35 million children who have not seen the inside of a school. On a typical day, roughly 290 million students are attending classes somewhere in our country. And yet, India has made only uneven progress in educating its population. Our national literacy level officially stands at 66 per cent. But one must be wary of these official figures. UNESCO defines an illiterate person as one who cannot, with understanding, both read and write a short, simple statement on their everyday life. By that definition, I fear that fewer than half our population would really qualify as literate. And while Kerala has a literacy rate of nearly 100 per cent, Bihar is only at 44 per cent (and has a female literacy rate of only 29 per cent). No wonder, we are ranked 147th out of 177 countries measured for literacy by UNESCO.

The traditional explanation for the failure to attain mass education is two-pronged: the lack of resources to cope with the dramatic growth in population (we would need to build a new school every day for the next 10 years just to educate the children already born) and the tendency of families to take their children out of school early to serve as breadwinners or at least as help at home or on the farm. Thus, though universal primary education is available in theory, fewer than half of India’s children between the ages of six and 14 attend school at all. India alone accounts for 35 per cent of the entire world’s population of children who are not in school.

Of course, official national policy is undoubtedly in favour of promoting education. As a child at school I remember being exhorted to impart the alphabet to our servants under the Gandhian ‘‘each one teach one’’ programme; and many of us were brought up on Swami Vivekananda’s writings about the importance of education for the poor as the key to their uplift. But it is true that, 61 years after Independence, progress has been inexcusably slow. Obviously, there are policy choices being made here. India spends less than 4 per cent of its GNP on education: 3.6 per cent is the current amount. Successive governments collectively have spent only one-tenth of the amounts on education that they have committed to defence. What is missing is not just financial resources, but a commitment on the part of our society as a whole to tackle the educational tasks that lie ahead.

India will not become a 21st century tiger without building up its ‘‘human capital’’. There is no industrial society today with an adult literacy rate of less than 80 per cent. No illiterate society has ever become an industrial tiger of any stripe. How are we going to cope with the 21st century, the information age, if half our population cannot sign their name or read a newspaper, let alone use a computer keyboard or surf the internet? Today’s is the Information Age: the world will be able to tell the rich from the poor not by GNP figures, but by their internet connections. Illiteracy is a self-imposed handicap in a race we have no choice but to run.

Our primary school system has become one of the largest in the world, with 150 million children enrolled. But let’s face it: we have sometimes focused on quantity rather than quality. Governments have simply raised enrolment rates without ensuring high learning achievement in schools. Thirty-seven per cent of all Indian primary schoolchildren drop out before reaching the 5th standard. The illiterate population of India exceeds the total combined population of the North American continent and Japan.

There is no effective answer to this problem that does not recognise the huge importance of teachers. If the Guruvar Awards can help make the teaching profession more attractive, they can also serve to bring others into the profession. Why not go the whole hog and enlist the media in this effort, as The Times of India is doing with its Teach India campaign? Can’t an enterprising TV channel make these awards into a ‘‘Teacher’s Oscars,’’ glamourising this needlessly humble profession? This would not just honour today’s teachers but help create the teachers of tomorrow.

To educate a child is to build the future. As Gabriela Mistral has so poignantly said, ‘‘We are guilty of many crimes, but our worst sin is abandoning the child; neglecting the foundation of life. Many of the things we need can wait; the child cannot. We cannot answer Tomorrow. Her name is Today.’’ —Times of India