Step 2: Female illiteracy increases. Educated women are crucial for progress and development in any society. Ensuring that the girl child gets into school and stays on there is a challenge that no country can afford to ignore. Also, high female literacy is strongly correlated with low population growth rate.

Since environmental degradation is increasing in several poorer parts of India and other developing countries, this raises numerous questions about the nature of schooling programmes needed in areas suffering from an ecological damage — heavy female work burden — low school enrollment of girls syndrome.

But merely providing schools is not enough to educate more than millions of illiterate women in India. The reality is that a heavy workload on the mother means the daughter cannot get an education even when access to a school is easy.

So regenerating India’s lands, making firewood, fodder and water easily available, and thereby reducing women’s work burden and spreading female literacy is a major challenge our political leaders face.