In 1974 the Government of India Ministry of Education and Social Welfare issued a booklet, Main Schemes of Non-Formal Education in the Fifth Five- Year Plan, the aim of which was to define the direction and thrust of a new policy agreed upon by the Central Advisory Board of Education in November 1974 [1]. This policy aimed at modifying and supplementing the school system by developing functional literacy programmes and by providing educational facilities for young persons in two age-groups, 6-14 and 15-25 years, who had dropped out of the school system. India's high rate of school pupil wastage needs no chronicling: official figures for 1973-74 show that an 84-4% enrolment of total population in standards 1 to 5 drops to 36% for standards 6 to 8 [2], and recent authorities suggest that official school population figures are optimistic sometimes by as much as 20% [3]. The government's proposals clearly aim at producing a back-up system to help the majority of pupils who have failed to work their way through the early stages of the school system. The problems of primary school inefficiency and wastage, together with the related issue of