Literacy rate up 9.2%; gender gap shrinking

The good news is that 74% of Indian population is literate now. But the better part of it is out of the total new literates added in the last decade, women outnumber men. However, the percentage of literate women stands at 65.46 compared to 82.14% in case of men.

The provisional data of the 2011 Census showed that the literacy level in the country has gone up by 9.21% in the past 10 years. This was 64.83% in 2001. This means three-fourth of the population aged seven years and above is literate in the country. The preliminary trend also indicates that a majority of the children who attained the age of seven were literate.

Kerala tops in female literacy with 91.98%. Bihar (53.33%) recorded the lowest. The states and Union Territories with female literacy rate below the national average are Orissa, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Jharkhand, Bihar and Rajasthan. In absolute terms, 21.7 crore additional persons (above 7 years) have become literate during the decade 2001-2011 and the total number of illiterates has come down from 30.4 crore to 27.2 crore. The notable feature is that out of the total decrease of 3.1 core in the number of illiterates, females (1.7 crore) outnumbered males (1.4 crore).