According to a report published by the Dalai Lama's Dharamsala-based government-in-exile titled "Environment and Development in Tibet, A Crucial Issue (available on its website)", before 1951, 92 percent of the population of Tibet was illiterate. That proportion now is 44 percent.

Likewise, a reporter from China Daily interviewing Duo Ji Ciren, Vice-Commissioner of the Administrative office of Nyingchi Prefecture, said that education had been key to social and economic progress in Tibet. Modern education began only after 1951. In 2007, enrolment in primary schools reached 98.2 percent, in middle schools 90.97 percent, in high school 42.96 percent, and in colleges 17.4 percent. The illiterate are now concentrated in the older age groups.

You had to be a monk if you wanted to receive education in the old society, said doctor Losang Yundeng, 51, director of the 210-bed County People's Hospital in Linzhi. As an ethnic Tibetan from a poor family in a remote village in Nyingchi Prefecture, he was sent to one of the first schools opened in his village.

When a medical team visited the village in 1972, the 15-year-old boy was chosen to receive training as a "barefoot doctor". After 1976,

Doctor Yundeng was trained at the Nanjing Medical College and later at the famous Norman Bethune Medical Academy.

Wangmo, 44, a brilliant Tibetan plant pathologist and professor in the Department of Plant Technology at the Tibetan Agriculture and Animal Husbandry College, Nyingchi Prefecture, told how education transformed life in her village.

"I studied in a village which you could only get to by horse", she said, "But education gives us capacity and confidence. In my school, 80 percent of the children were Tibetan and the educational condition was very good".

In the college where she teaches, half of the 3,000 students are girls and 80 percent are Tibetan, according to China Daily.

Facts speak lounder than words. Let's take a look at the changes taken place in Tibet: