Interlinkages of Literacy and Household Poverty in India: Inter-District and Socio-Demographic Disparities by Bidyadhar Dehury in BJSTR
Abstract
Poverty and illiteracy are the greatest challenges in the process of
development. Though India has witnessed tremendous improvement
both in reducing poverty and increasing literacy rate, the
inter-district variations and differentials within different population
subgroups are
still large. Using the Census of India, 2011 data this paper attempts to
understand the inter-district variations in poverty and literacy status
and also differentials of literacy rate among different social
sub-groups. The census of India collects the information on seven
household assets.
These are used to construct the wealth index as a proxy for consumption
poverty using Principal Component Analysis from inter-district
variations. The preliminary results show that the inter-district and
intra-district variations are large in assets possession.India has 17.8% of the households those do not possess any of the
specified household assets with lowest in Chennai district of Tamil Nadu
with less than one percent and highest in Dindori district of Madhya
Pradesh with 64.9%. With respect to the effective literacy status, India
has 73% of literate population among 7 years and above. After
classifying the effective literacy status by poverty, it is found that
the effective
literacy rate among the districts from lowest wealth tertile was 66.1%
compared to 80.7% among the districts from higher wealth tertile. The
study found a positive and high correlation of 0.611 between wealth
score and effective literacy rate at the district level. However, there
are
certain districts which had low effective literacy rate despite high
wealth score. The study also observed that the females especially among
ST
population are still far lag behind to achieve satisfactory effective
literacy level in India. Thus, immediate interventions should be
addressed
among the most disadvantaged districts and especially the females among
ST population.
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