Intelligent Literacy Day is observed all over the world on 8 September. The purpose of celebrating this day is to promote giving priority to education towards the people in the society. The first Literacy Day was celebrated in the year 1966 and the year 2009-2010 was declared the United Nations Literacy Decade.
The report, based on data from July 2017 to June 2018, states the state-wise literacy rate among persons aged seven or over seven years.
- LITERACY RATE
- The literacy rate in India is 77.7 percent.
- The literacy rate in rural areas is 73.5 percent.
- While in urban areas the figure is 87.7 percent.
- Kerala has the best performance in literacy, where 96.2 percent people are literate.
- At the same time, Andhra Pradesh is the most laggard state in the country, where the number of literate people is just 66.4 percent.
- Male literacy rate in the country is much better than women.
- Here 70.3% women are literate as compared to 84.7% men.
- In Kerala, 97.4% males and 95.2% females are literate. In Delhi, 93.7% males and 82.4% females are literate.
Female literacy rate is one of the major reasons for the worst performing states.
Andhra has a male literacy rate of 73.5%, female literacy rate of 59.5%. 57.6% of women are literate as compared to 80.8% of men in Rajasthan. Bihar has a literacy rate of 79.7% for males and 60.5% for females.
International Literacy Day 2020 focuses on “Literacy teaching and learning in the COVID-19 crisis and beyond,” especially on the role of educators and changing pedagogies. The theme highlights literacy learning in a lifelong learning perspective, and therefore, mainly focuses on youth and adults.
During COVID-19, in many countries, adult literacy programmes were absent in the initial education response plans, so most adult literacy programmes that did exist were suspended, with just a few courses continuing virtually, through TV and radio, or in open air spaces.
