The good news coming out of India's education sector, in rural areas, is that, thanks largely to schemes such as the mid-day meal and the Integrated Child Development Services, the universalisation of education is nearly complete.

The NGO Pratham's Annual Status of Education Report, which involved a sample survey where over 320,000 households were interviewed in detail across 15,845 villages in 556 districts, has just been released for the year 2006, and that shows enrolment levels in the 6-14 year old age group are broadly the same as last year, at around 93 per cent.

The other piece of good news is that, within just a year, the share of children that are being catered to by private schools is up a whopping 2.5 percentage points - in terms of the number of children being educated in private schools, that's a growth upwards of 15 per cent at the all-India level.

For some states like Punjab, the growth is much larger. Also, the Pratham ASER points out, that while the distance to be travelled in terms of children getting the 3Rs is huge, there is some degree of progress in just this last one year (Pratham's report, unfortunately, caters only to rural areas and says nothing about urban India).

While the enrolment figure seems very high, especially given the fairly high levels of illiteracy in the country, Pratham has some explanation for this. As many as 46.6 per cent of children who are five years old are enrolled in primary school (the figure is 71 per cent in the case of Rajasthan and 74 per cent for Orissa).

This then distorts the figures for enrolment at the primary school level since this is usually calculated by dividing the total number of children enrolled with the census numbers of the total population in that age group.

The high primary school enrolment figures have to be juxtaposed with the findings that, by the age of 15-16, over 21 per cent of children are no longer in school, that is, they've either dropped out or simply never went to school in the first place.

Pratham then calculates that more than half the children who enroll in Class 1 drop out before completing Class 8. This has an important repercussion since it means a huge waste in resources - children who've studied just 5-6 years in school are, for all practical purposes, illiterate.

The results of the Pratham Survey of learning skills show an improvement over last year, but the road ahead is a long one. Pratham volunteers did simple age-appropriate tests of reading/writing and basic arithmetic like recognition of numbers in lower age groups and simple division in higher age groups.

At the all-India level, it found the proportion of children in the first and second standard who could read the alphabet in their native languages is up by 4.2 percentage points, from 70.3 last year to 74.5 per cent this year. States like Madhya Pradesh recorded a huge increase (31.9 per cent), while others like Punjab (13.9) and Haryana (10.2) also did well. While some part of this was achieved through a huge shift in children out of government schools to private ones, this is not true in all cases.

In Punjab, for instance, the proportion of rural children going to private schools rose from 24.5 per cent in 2005 to 40.5 per cent in 2006, and this largely explains the higher levels of learning.

In Madhya Pradesh, however, the proportion of children being schooled privately is up from 8.4 per cent to 11.3 per cent only, so the change that has taken place is clearly in the state's schools, possibly the experiment of hiring para-teachers that was begun during Digvijay Singh's tenure as chief minister.

Gujarat, surprisingly, has among the lowest levels of privately-schooled children (7.5 per cent in 2005, going down to 5.1 in 2006) as compared to the national average of 18.8 per cent. While this suggests the quality of government-schools in the state is better than in others, the learning skills of children aren't much above the national average either - 79.3 per cent versus 74.5 per cent for the country as a whole when it comes to Class 1-2 students who can read letters, words, or more.

When it comes to children in Classes 3-5 who can do subtraction or more, against the national average of 64.7 per cent, that for Gujarat was 62.4, while it was 81.6 per cent in the case of Madhya Pradesh, 65.9 in the case of Punjab, and 80.6 in the case of Haryana.

Kerala, not surprisingly given its literacy levels, fares much higher than the national average on these skills, but the proportion of privately-schooled children is a whopping 45.8 per cent, the highest in the country if you leave out tiny states like Meghalaya and Manipur.

While there is a huge improvement, however, the real problem that needs to be tackled is that of children failing repeatedly and then dropping out as a result. According to Pratham, while around 13.5 per cent of all 14-year olds are not in school, another 14.4 per cent of them are studying in class 6 or below.

Therefore, over a fourth of children who were 10 years old when the Constitution was amended in 2002 to make elementary education compulsory, will not complete this level this year. The problem of over-age children in higher classes is acute at all levels - 21.4 per cent of those in class 3 are above 10 years of age, and this rises to 28 per cent in the case of Uttar Pradesh and to over 35 per cent in the case of states like Bihar and Jharkhand. Overage children at the primary level, says Pratham, are less likely to complete the elementary stage.

The other big lesson from the Pratham survey is the role of adult education, particularly female, in improving learning skills of the younger generation. The ASER report confirms an earlier Unicef report which states that children of mothers who have not been to school are five times as likely to be out of school.

Children in the age group 6-8 whose mothers have not gone to school are three times as likely not to be able to read the alphabet than children of mothers who have studied till at least Class 5. Now if only Pratham would do similar work in urban areas.