Andhra Pradesh ends up at the bottom in Literacy Rate, Kerala bags the top spot

NEW DELHI: Data from a report on education by National Statistical Office (NSO) placed Kerala on top and Andhra Pradesh at the bottom of the list. According to Literacy Rate data, top five performers are Kerala (96.2 per cent), Delhi (88.7 per cent), Uttarakhand (87.6 per cent), Himachal Pradesh (86.6) and Assam (85.9). States like Uttar Pradesh (73 per cent), Telangana (72.8 per cent), Bihar (70.9 per cent), Rajasthan (69.7 per cent) and Andhra Pradesh (66.4 per cent) are below the national average of 77.7 per cent. This data is of the year 2017-18, for people aged 7 or above.

Kerala remains at the top of the table, when the data talks about the gap between male and female. This gap is lowest in Kerala which stands at about 2.2 per cent. Surprisingly, this is a lot better than the All India gap of around 14.4 per cent. Moreover, the states with the lowest literacy rate usually have the highest literacy gap between males and females. However, this is not the case in Andhra Pradesh, where the gap in literacy rates of males and females is 13.4 per cent, which is still less than Rajasthan, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. 

The gap between Urban and Rural literacy rate is of nearly the same magnitude as males and females. Kerala is once again the top performer with a gap of 1.9 per cent and Telangana comes last with a 23.4 per cent gap. The combined effect of both Gender and Rural-Urban gap results in an national average of 27.2 per cent gap between urban male and rural female. It is higher for individual states, such as Rajasthan (38.5 per cent) and Telangana (38 per cent). Male urban literacy is below 90 per cent in four major states and rural female literacy rate is above 80 per cent only in Kerala and is below 70 per cent in 13 states.