Question

Give a detailed account of literacy rate of India as per census 2001.

Answer 1

Literacy is among the most promising aspects of the latest census. India's literacy rate increased by 13 percentage points, from 52 percent in 1991 to 65 percent in 2001. Seventy-six percent of males and 54 percent of females are now literate, compared with levels of 64 percent and 39 percent, respectively, in 1991.

The literacy rate of the population aged 7+ according to the 2001 population census is 65.4 whereas it was only 52.2 in 1991. The growth has been much faster compared to that of the previous decade since the literacy rate increased by 13.2 percentage points between 1991 and 2001, whereas it had increased only by 8.6 percentage points between 1981 and 1991. In fact, the growth during 1991-2001 exceeded that of every previous decade. Since the growth in terms of percentage points generally slows down as one approaches the ceiling of 100%, the accelerated growth during 1991-2001 can be considered as a great achievement. Another remarkable feature of the results on literacy in 2001 census is that, for the first time, the number of non-literates declined between 1991 and 2001, instead of increasing. Upto 1991, in spite of some increase in literacy rate between two consecutive census years, the number of non-literates did not decline, but continued to increase. This trend was reversed in 2001 because of the rapid rise in the number of literates and some slowing down of population growth rate during 1991-2001. Between 1991 and 2001, while the number of literates increased by 203.6 million (that is, by 56.8%), the number of non-literates decreased by 32.0 million (that is, by 9.7%)

In 2000–01, there were 60,840 pre-primary and pre-basic schools, and 664,041 primary and junior basic schools. Total enrolment at the primary level has increased from 19,200,000 in 1950–51 to 109,800,000 in 2001–02. The number of high schools in 2000–01 was higher than the number of primary schools at the time of independence.