New Delhi: Figures reported for International Literacy Day have put Kerala at the top of the country’s literacy table once again. In the report based on the National Statistical Office (NSO) survey, Kerala comes first as the state with the highest literacy in the country with a massive rate of 96.2 per cent. Andhra Pradesh, on the other hand, with a meagre 66.4 per cent, ended last in the survey.
As per the survey that provides the literacy rates of each state among people from the age of 7 years and above, Delhi’s literacy rate is second highest at 88 per cent. Following Delhi, Uttarakhand is at 87.6 per cent, Himachal Pradesh at 86.6 per cent and Assam at 85.9 per cent. On the other hand, Rajasthan performed second worst, after Andhra Pradesh, at 69.7 per cent. Next is Bihar with a literacy rate of 70.9 per cent, followed by Telangana at 72.8 per cent. Then come Uttar Pradesh at 73 per cent and Madhya Pradesh at 73.7 per cent.
The survey behind International Literacy Day
The numbers come from the 75th round of the National Sample Survey, a study of household social consumption on education carried out between 1 July 2017 and 30 June 2018. The Ministry of Statistics summary puts the all-India literacy rate for persons aged seven and above at 77.7 per cent: 73.5 per cent in rural India and 87.7 per cent in the towns and cities. In all, the round covered 1,13,757 households and enumerated 5,13,366 people.
The timing of the headlines, around International Literacy Day on 8 September, gave the field work a fresh news peg. The state rankings that followed are drawn from the same survey, so they describe India as it stood in 2017-18, before the pandemic closed its schools.
There is a substantial gap between male and female literacy rate at the national and the state level. India’s overall male literacy rate at 84.7 per cent is higher than female literacy rate at 70.3 per cent. Similarly in Kerala, the male literacy rate is 97.4 per cent versus the female literacy rate at 95.2 per cent. Delhi records the male literacy rate at 93.7 per cent as compared to 82.4 per cent in females.
Especially among the states with the lowest literacy rates this gap was huge. For example, Andhra Pradesh records a male literacy rate of 73.4 per cent while female literacy rate at 59.5 per cent. In Rajasthan, the male literacy rate is even higher at 80.8 per cent in comparison with female literacy rate at 57.6 per cent. Similarly, in Bihar, the male literacy rate stands at 79.7 per cent as compared with the female literacy rate at 60.5 per cent.
The survey sampled 64, 519 agrarian families from 8,097 villages and 49,238 urban families from 6,188 blocks across India.
Almost 24 per cent of people between the ages of 15-29 years in rural areas and 56 per cent in the urban population were able to use a computer. Besides, almost 4 per cent of the village population and 23 per cent of the urban population had a computer. Almost 35 per cent of people aged 15-29 admitted to the use of the internet 30 days before the survey. The ratio between urban and rural population is nearly 58 per cent to 25 per cent respectively.
The survey clearly shows that India has a long way to go in providing education to every citizen and hence, securing its bright and now digital, future.
National Statistical Office: literacy rate tables in detail
Literacy is only the first table in the report. The survey found attendance close to universal at primary level, with the gross attendance ratio near 100 for both boys and girls, slipping to 94.7 for males and 94.1 for females at upper primary, and to 87.4 and 85.1 at secondary level. Households were spending an average of about Rs 8,331 on a student in a general course in the current academic session, and Rs 50,307 on one in a technical or professional course, a six-fold gap.
The gender arithmetic is consistent across the tables. Nationally the male-female gap in the literacy rate runs to a little over 14 percentage points, and it widens where overall literacy is lowest: more than 23 points in Rajasthan, around 19 in Bihar and nearly 14 in Andhra Pradesh, three of the states at the bottom of the table.
Kerala’s lead is old, but the survey shows other states climbing behind it, with Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and Assam all above 85 per cent. The household figures behind the usage numbers were starker still: about 24 per cent of households had internet access, 15 per cent in the villages against 42 per cent in the cities. Put together, the tables published around International Literacy Day sketch the two Indias that online classrooms would split apart two years later.
Since then: a national adult literacy push
The main national response to adult illiteracy since the survey has been the New India Literacy Programme, a centrally sponsored scheme running for five years from 2022-23 to 2026-27 with an outlay of Rs 1,037.90 crore, of which Rs 700 crore is the central share and Rs 337.90 crore the states’ share, according to a written reply by Minister of State for Education Annpurna Devi in the Lok Sabha on 12 December 2022, published by the Press Information Bureau. Allocations for the first year, 2022-23, came to about Rs 209 crore.
Its target is five crore learners in foundational literacy and numeracy, and the scheme has five components: foundational literacy and numeracy, critical life skills, vocational skills development, basic education and continuing education. The gender and regional gaps the 2017-18 survey measured, from Kerala’s 96.2 per cent to Andhra Pradesh’s 66.4, are the baseline against which the programme’s results will be read. The literacy rate the programme set out to raise was itself measured in 2017-18, a reminder that in this field the data trails the work.
