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NEW DELHI: Amid the challenges posed by the coronavirus pandemic for students and educators, the world watched the International Literacy Day on Tuesday. Celebrated annually on September 8, International Literacy Day was declared for the first time in The UNESCO1966 general conference to celebrate world literacy.
According to UNESCO, 773 million adults and young people around the world still lack basic literacy skills. As the near-global lockdown caused by Covid-19 has disrupted education, “affecting more than 91% of students and 99% of teachers,” UNESCO announced the issue for International Literacy Day 2020 as “teaching and learning literacy in the COVID-19 crisis and beyond.”
Back home in India, the disruption that Covid-19 has caused in the education sector has been unprecedented and has led to several controversies. While parents have debated when or if schools should reopen, students taking competitive exams at the undergraduate level have also contemplated the impact of the pandemic on their careers.
India literacy rate
Meanwhile, on Monday, the National Statistical Office (NSO) released 2017-18 data on the state literacy rate in the country for all ages 7 and over. According to NSO, the average literacy rate in India is 77.7%.
While Andhra Pradesh’s literacy rate of 66.4% is the worst among all Indian states and significantly lower than Bihar’s 70.9%, Kerala ranks first on the list at 96.2 %. Delhi ranked second with 88.7%.
More impressive still, the gap between male and female literacy is the smallest in Kerala at just 2.2 percentage points. To put that in context, the India-wide gap is 14.4 percentage points, with 84.7% male literacy and 70.3% female literacy.
The gap between urban and rural literacy rates is of the same order of magnitude as that between men and women. Once again, Kerala has the lowest gap of 1.9 percentage points. At the other end of the spectrum in this count are Telangana, where urban literacy is 23.4 percentage points higher than rural literacy, and Andhra Pradesh, where the difference is 19.2 percentage points.
NSO surveyed around 1.13 lakh households in 8,000 villages and 6,000 urban blocks. Data for the report was collected during 2017-18 for the age group 7 years and older.
How India calculates the literacy rate
The literacy rate is calculated by dividing the number of literates in a given age range by the population of the corresponding age group. Then the result is multiplied by 100.
Alternatively, the same method can be applied to calculate the number of illiterates; or by subtracting the literacy rate from 100%.
According to the 2011 census, anyone seven years of age or older who has the ability to read and write is considered literate.
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