At 65%, India has a worse literacy rates than Zambia, Tanzania or Combodia. Because the NUMBER of people in the educated middle classes is so high (as opposed to the percentage of people), our perception of the scope of this problem is skewed.

Kaushik Basu claims that we can't get kids to go to school until we start getting their teachers to take classes regularly. This statement threw me because I had been very fortunate in my teachers in the primary schools (and before you start getting snarky on me let me point out that I went to a government school). Basu says that a recent World Bank - Harvard study concluded that teacher absenteesm in India is 25%. Only Uganda seems to have a worse record (Papua New Guinea does better)

He suggests an interesting approach for resolving this problem in his BBC column.

(Via Suhit Anantula)