India is a country that has adopted the Right to Education Act and has mentioned this right in Article 21A of the Indian Constitution; even then India has struggled to achieve a literacy rate of just 74-75 percent. This figure may seem huge, but it refers to the simple criteria to certify that a person is literate along with the world moving forward; the figure appears to be small only.
To determine the literacy rate along with the percentage of educated people, we need to look at various heads of education in India. Here we will discuss some issues to increase the percentage of education in India.
Primary education
The opening of Anganwadi centers and Indian public schools in each and every city and town has brought most children to school. In addition, the appropriate governments also provide students with various benefits like free education, meals, books, and uniforms. This is the level of education where most students are enrolled and moving up.
Secondary Education
This is the level where school dropout begins. The reason is, the poor conditions of the family. Not in all states, education up to the secondary level is free. The poor send their sons to work and marry off their daughters after completing their primary education. Scholarship schemes can help benefit this level of education.
higher education
This is the level of education that most students tend not to opt for. The reason is the high fees. It is very obvious that top class government universities like IIT, NLU, AIIMS, IIM, NIFT have high prices and private institutions charge double and more. For this reason, the majority of the population that is poor or constitutes the lower middle class does not send their children to higher education. They prefer to send their children to work. Central and state universities charge less, but poor households still cannot pay the same. In this sense, the different scholarship plans have played a very important role and also the reserve.
adult education
This is one of the most observed trends in rural areas. The reason is that the population is unaware of the advantages of being literate. In rural areas, night schools are operated by NGOs where farmers who are not literate and also, the population who is older change, receive free education. This type of schooling is becoming popular and is yielding fruitful results.
gender literacy
Gender literacy is a huge problem that the country needs to address. Based on the statistics, we can see that 82 percent of men are literate compared to 65 percent of women. There is still a huge gap of 17 percent. Although the 2011 census figures are better than the previous ones. It is only due to the different schemes introduced by the different State Governments with the support of the Central Government. Schemes like Cycle Yojana, Uniform, Free meals and most importantly free education have attracted most of the country’s female students to schools. Poor parents are now sending their daughters to school.
Education is very important to survive in today’s globalized world. Most of the time it is seen that the poor are the ones who remain literate and so are their children. This is one of the reasons they are victimized. But, the efforts of governments at different levels have helped to increase the literacy rate in recent years and continue to do the same.
