According to data published by the Central Bureau of Statistics last year, 86 percent of youths between 15 to 24 years of age are not even able to read and write a simple letter and this stems from the fact that education for children was never taken seriously by previous governments. If the government even today does not learn from past mistakes and keeps on cutting down the budget aimed at making our children literate, then chances are we will always have a significant majority of our youths illiterate. The irony is that at a time when governments in our neighborhood are taking education seriously and investing hefty sums in it, our own government has decided to cut 30 percent of the budget for education.
Yet another irony is that while on the one hand the government has decided to cut the budget for education, it has on the other decided to sanction Rs 1 billion for the Ministry of Education to hire more teachers to support schools that are facing a scarcity of teachers. However, there are 12,000 redundant teachers across the country who are costing the country Rs 120 million annually. In this context, the only logical thing to do would have been to send those redundant teachers to the schools lacking in teachers and instead of spending a billion on hiring new teachers, use the money for funding the NFEC campaign.
Sadly, all these unfortunate decisions prove that education is yet to get the topmost priority in our country. We demand that education be prioritized to achieve the goal of making all Nepalis literate in order to set our country off on the course of development.
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