India is beginning to make quite a habit of sliding to the back of the class. After getting poor marks on the count of human development, it has been ranked 105 among 164 countries in a Unesco report based on the education development index. But like all smart bad boys, India always puts up a good show, perhaps with the hope that the world will be too dazzled and distracted by the spectacle of scientists, engineers and information technology whizkids it produces and exports to look into the grey area beyond. It is a pity that commitments made in international fora cannot be either glossed over or wished away. In 2000, India had been one of the 164 countries that had signed the Unesco’s Education for All by 2015 campaign. It may have been blithe ignorance of the actual levels of literacy and education among people in the country — the people who cannot be shown off as eminently exportable — that led to the brash promise, or an optimism of gigantic proportions. Optimism that nationwide programmes for universal education, such as the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan or the National Literacy Mission, could be implemented and made to bear fruit in all states and regions with equal speed and focus in order to reach the target on time.

India is a poor student of history on top of everything else, or the policymakers would have known by now what the real obstacles to universal education have been for all these 60 years. And instead of feeling smug about the whizkids, they would have been alarmed at the difference in percentages of population between the highly educated and the illiterate, between the boys who make it in Silicon Valley and those who work in tea-stalls and sweatshops, between the girls who rise to run corporations and those who drop out of school in Class V or VIII so that they can be married off at 10 or 12 or 14 to save their parents the enormous amount of dowry that must be paid if the girls cross eighteen.

The mid-term report — Unesco was checking how far the 164 countries had reached at half-way point — places India between Nicaragua and Iraq, two countries ravaged by war and poverty. The proud claimant to an extraordinary economic growth rate, India might try and make use of the refracted light this juxtaposition throws on its apparently sparkling image. Maybe it is time for a little out-of-the-box thinking, even if the country is to achieve the modified goal of 85 per cent literacy by 2012 announced by the prime minister and the Congress president. A miracle can occur in four years, but that would have to be manmade, not an angel’s gift. The miracle can only be imagined as wartime engagement with primary, secondary and adult education equally across genders, regions and classes. It can be done, but is there the dedicated as well as sensitive army to do it?