India s Educational Efforts Rhetoric and Reality

P Radhakrishnan R Akila Despite 40 years of planning and the rhetoric in successive plans regarding the importance of education for all sections of society, the government has failed to draw the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and women into the mainstream of educational development, 'this is due, in part, to the continuing dominance of the traditionally well-entrenched upper castes for whom one way of ensuring their hegemony is to keep the underprivileged in perpetual ignorance.