India falls short in female literacy
Data from new research on female literacy
show that India’s school education system is under-performing in terms of
quality when compared to its neighbours, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal.
- The research was carried out by New York-based
International Commission on Financing Global Education Opportunity. The
research studies changes in female literacy over a number of schooling
years.
Highlights:
- The proportion of women who
completed five years of primary schooling in India and were literate was
48%, much less than 92% in Nepal, 74% in Pakistan and 54% in Bangladesh.
- Female literacy rates went up by
one to 15% after completing two years of schooling. Corresponding numbers
for Pakistan and Nepal were 3 to 31% and 11 to 47% respectively. This
implies that schooling is roughly twice as productive at generating
literacy for women during the early grades in Pakistan when compared to
India.
- India ranks low in global indices
of female literacy as well. If countries are ranked by the earliest grade
at which at least half of the women are literate — a proxy for quality of
learning — India ranks 38th among the 51 developing countries for which
comparable data is available. Indonesia, Rwanda, Ethiopia and Tanzania —
all rank higher than India.
Background:
For this research, the authors devised a way
to measure the quality of education around the world, with a specific focus on
girls, using data from nationally representative Demographic and Health Surveys
(DHS) — one of the most comparable data sources on living standards in the
developing world.
