With 96.2%, Kerala has once again etched its place as the most literate state in India, followed by national capital Delhi at 89%, revealed data from a report on education released by the National Statistical Office (NSO). There has often been a conjecture around South Indian states being more literate than the North, however, the latest data debunked that.
The data, which is for 2017-18 and for all aged 7 or more, showed that the popular idea of “developed states” can be misleading with regard to literacy.
According to the report, the southern state of Andhra Pradesh has ranked the worst among all states in India in terms of literacy rate, behind Bihar’s 70.9%. While Andhra’s literacy rate is at 66.4%, Telangana’s is 72.8%, which worse than the national average of 77.7% and Karnataka’s is 77.2%.
Meanwhile, Assam and Uttarakhand shared the top four positions with 85.9% and 87.6%, respectively, after Kerala and Delhi among the major states and Union Territories.
In Kerala, the gap between male and female literacy is the thinnest at just 2.2 percentage points. For perspective, at the all-India level, the gap is 14.4 percentage points with male literacy at 84.7% and female literacy at 70.3%. Besides the gender-wise gap in literacy rate, Kerala has the lowest gap between urban and rural literacy rates with 1.9 percentage points.
The worst in this regard are the states of Telangana, where urban literacy is 23.4 percentage points higher than rural literacy, and Andhra Pradesh, where the difference is 19.2 percentage points. The difference between urban male literacy and rural female literacy is an alarming 27.2 percentage points at the national level.
In Rajasthan, the difference between urban male literacy and rural female literacy is 38.5 percentage points (9.1% versus 52.6%) and in Telangana, 38 percentage points (91.7% versus 53.7%). Meanwhile, the male urban literacy is under 90% in only four major states and below 85% in none of them.
Usually, the states with relatively low literacy rates also have an affinity of having the highest gender skews, however, in case of Andhra Pradesh, the gap between male and female literacy rates is only 13.9 percentage points, while Rajasthan (23.2), Bihar (19.2) and UP (18.4) have pronounced gaps inspite of having better overall literacy rates.
On the contrary in Kerala, the rural female literacy is above 80% and below 70% in 13 of the 22 major states. In four of these, it is below 60%.
Comments
0 comment