Differences among political parties over the appointment of teaching staff have led the District Education Office (DEO) Dhanusha to cancel this year’s literacy classes under the government’s Literate Nepal Mission.

It is the second consecutive year the district, which has the fourth largest number of illiterates after Sarlahi, Mahottari and Rautahat in the country, failed to implement the literacy programme after political parties failed to reach an agreement on sharing quotas for teachers. According to a survey carried out by the Non-Formal Education Centre (NFEC), there are 188,644 illiterate people in Dhanusha. The government had allocated Rs 10 million to run the programme in the district.

“This is unfortunate. We have asked the DEO to return the entire budget allocated for the programme,” said NFEC Director Baburam Poudel.

The ambitious three-year programme was launched by the Baburam Bhattarai-led government last year after the Literacy Campaign initiated in 2009 failed to meet its target in four years.

The programme aims to mobilise around 207,000 volunteers and 20,700 monitors in order to achieve total literacy by 2015 by bringing 1,380,000 illiterates to non-formal classes at 36,000 centres across the country.

However, the Rs 3.95-billion programme which was scheduled to start on January first week this year was initiated only in the third week of February after the Ministry of Finance failed to provide adequate and timely budget. Though the NFEC which is tasked with executing the programme had demanded Rs 1.38 billion for the current fiscal year to meet the target, it received only Rs 633 million.

This year, the campaign aims to make 612,920 people of 15-60 age group literate by enrolling them in 150 hours of informal classes in 21,029 centres.

source: the kathmandu post,3 june 2013