FREE BUT FETTERED—THE ILLITERATE CITIZEN

Summary

Delivered on 27 October 1970 as the Fifth A. D. Shroff Memorial Lecture under the auspices of the Forum of Free Enterprise in Bombay, C. D. Deshmukh’s address opens with a tribute to A. D. Shroff as an exemplar of a patriotism that ‘can co-exist with a judicious bias in favour of free enterprise’, then pivots to its real subject: the political and economic cost of mass illiteracy in India. The thesis, which Deshmukh borrows in part from the Education (Kothari) Commission of 1964, is that an illiterate population cannot exercise the citizenship that the Constitution promises — that India’s adults are, in the phrase he repeatedly returns to, free but fettered.

In the rendered pages Deshmukh moves chronologically through India’s planning record on literacy and adult education. He revisits the First Five-Year Plan’s coinage of ‘Social Education’ as an all-comprehensive uplift through community action, contrasts its ambition with the modest outlays that followed in the Second, Third and Fourth Plans, and tracks the headline numbers: literacy at 8.3% in 1931 (undivided British India), 17.2% in 1951, about 24% in 1961, and 28.6% in 1966 — gains that, against population growth of 2.5% a year, leave India with roughly 350 million illiterates, about two-thirds of all illiterates in the world. He notes the persistent gaps between male and female, and between urban and rural literacy.

Deshmukh then traces the international turn of the late 1960s, drawing on his own role as a consulting expert in UNESCO’s Asian Model of Educational Development (Bangkok, November 1965) and on the work of his wife, Dr. Mrs. Durgabai Deshmukh, who convened the sub-group on Literacy Education for the Kothari Commission’s Adult Education Task Force (chaired by D. S. Kothari, with V. S. Jha as convenor). He quotes at length the Asian Model’s reasoning that adult education must become ‘functional’ — geared to economic and social needs — and the Kothari Commission’s blunt verdict that ‘The uneducated is not in reality a free citizen’, that the strategy of relying on free and compulsory schooling alone has failed, and that ‘a massive unorthodox national effort’ is now required. The rendered pages end mid-argument, having set out the diagnosis (drawing on a UNESCO-sponsored study by J. M. Kapoor and Prodipto Roy on retention of literacy) and the prerequisites the Commission identified for sustained eradication — what Deshmukh will presumably build into a programme over the lecture’s remaining pages.

Key points

• Framed as the Fifth A. D. Shroff Memorial Lecture (27 October 1970, Bombay), opening with a tribute that yokes patriotism to free enterprise.

• Central claim, borrowed from the Kothari Commission: an illiterate citizen is not in reality a free citizen — illiteracy is a fetter on democratic and economic life.

• Walks through India’s Five-Year Plans on literacy and ‘Social Education’, noting declining seriousness from the First Plan’s ambitious community-action vision to the Fourth Plan’s silence on prior efforts.

• Marshals statistics: literacy rising from 8.3% (1931) to 17.2% (1951) to ~24% (1961) to 28.6% (1966), yet absolute illiterates grew because population grew at 2.5% per year.

• Calls out India’s particular failure on a global scale — 350 million illiterates, two-thirds of the world’s total — and persistent urban/rural and male/female gaps.

• Draws on UNESCO’s Asian Model of Educational Development (Bangkok, 1965), which he and Durgabai Deshmukh helped draft, to argue adult education must become ‘functional’ — tied to economic priorities.

• Reports the Kothari Commission’s verdict that India’s primary-school-only strategy has failed and that 7 years of education for all children will not be achieved until 1986 rather than the constitutional 1961 target.

• Closes the rendered section with the Commission’s prerequisites for sustained literacy programmes: industrialisation, recognition of illiterate resistance to change, follow-up provision, and avoidance of past errors of scale, sporadicity and haste.