“Can literacy give my daughter a job?” “Can literacy drill a borewell in my field?” These are two of the many questions, Eeranna Kosagi, district literacy officer of Raichur, had to confront with when he went with his team to identify illiterates in the remote areas and inspire them to know the alphabets.

Karnataka that boasts of being the knowledge state for having India’s premier educational institutes has Raichur district on the flip-side. The 2001 census revealed that Raichur has maximum number of illiterates as the literacy rate there is merely 48 per cent.

The overall literacy rate in the state, is 67 per cent and the planners of literacy programme have thrown a challenge this year on their subordinates to achieve 85 per cent literacy.

The challenge is not of funds. “We have no dearth of funds,” says Commissioner of Mass Education K Shivaram. The biggest challenge, however, is to persuade the illiterates to realise the power of alphabets. And the reasons behind the poor literacy rate are quite obvious.

“At many places, we were even asked ‘whether your literacy will plough our fields’ and ‘will literacy get me food today’. Our reply is ‘yes’ but they never rely on us,” said a Preraka of Bangalore. A district education officer said, “There are several unemployed literate youths around us and the illiterates are using them as examples.”

Job insecurity
Realising the job insecurity among the illiterates, some experiments are going on at Raichur where girls are given vocational training like sewing and stitching along with making them literate under the Income Generation Programme (IGP). There are 539 centres in the district and the literacy mission has provided one sewing machine to each centre. Along with it, four sewing machines each have been given at 49 Nodal Continuing Education Centres. Eeranna claims that these measures are yielding good results as girls and women have started coming to the centre. “If we cannot think of their employment, illiterates would consider literacy as a wastage of time,” said Eeranna Kosagi.

However, at Raichur this is the only one major programme of providing vocational course to attract illiterates, while there are no vocational programmes for men. Other districts too are lacking such vocational packages.
Understanding the challenge of attracting the illiterates to the study centre, Mr Shivaram had sent a proposal to the State government that if the beneficiaries of government schemes are illiterates then they should become literate first by undergoing literacy programme. However, this proposal was turned down.

3 NEW SCHEMES
Intending to use latest technologies to spread literacy in the state, the Directorate of Mass Education is set to launch three programmes on the international literacy day on September 8.

“We are starting ‘Literacy Through Radio’, ‘Literacy Through Computers’, and ‘Literacy Through Edu-Sat’ from Saturday,” said K Shivaram, Commissioner of the Mass Education while talking about the status of literacy mission in the state.

The literacy through radio programme will be launched on Saturday at 4 pm at 18,000 saksharatha samithi centres across the State. Similarly, literacy through edu-sat would be started in Chamarajnagar and Gulbarga districts at 895 centres. The edu-sat programme titled “Sakshara Sangathi” has 30 lessons while the computer programme named “Baravva Kaliyake” has 40 lessons.