25% of 14-18 age group in rural India struggle to read ‘grade 2’ text

Among the 14-18-year-old age group in rural India, 86.8% are currently enrolled in educational institutions, but 25% of them struggle to read a "second-grade level text" in their regional language, the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER 2023) 'Beyond Basics' survey, conducted by Pratham Foundation, a non-profit organisation dedicated to education, shows.

ASER 2023 report delves into mathematical abilities, revealing nearly 85% of surveyed youth could measure length from the '0' mark on a scale, but this drops to 39% when the starting point is altered. Overall, around 50% can perform common calculations.

Those proficient in subtraction were tested on financial tasks; over 60% managed budgeting, 37% applied discounts, but only 10% handled repayments, as per the ASER 2023 survey.

The ASER 2023 report highlights a significant challenge, noting that over half of the youth struggle with division problems (3-digit by 1-digit). Only 43.3% of 14-18-year-olds excel, a skill typically anticipated in the third and fourth grades.

The ASER 2023 survey showed gender disparities, with a majority of youngsters inclined towards the arts/humanities stream. In 11th grade or higher, over 55.7% are enrolled in Arts/Humanities, while females exhibit a lower likelihood of pursuing STEM (28.1%) compared to males (36.3%).

The 2023 survey further reported that just over half could read English sentences (57.3%). Among those proficient, nearly 73.5% comprehend meanings. “Across enrollment categories, females (76%) do better than males (70.9%) in reading a Std II level text in their regional language. In contrast, males do better than their female counterparts in arithmetic and English reading,” the ASER 2023 survey states.

The ASER 2023 survey was conducted across 28 districts in 26 states of rural India. It reached a total of 34,745 youth in the age group 14-18 years in one rural district in each major state, except for Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, where two rural districts were surveyed.

Comparatively, ASER’s 2022 survey said that for the country as a whole (all India rural), the percentage of all children aged 11 to 14 who were enrolled in government schools had risen from 65% in 2018 to 71.7% in 2022. “While it is well known that India is close to universal enrollment for the elementary school age group, what is less known is that across all age groups, including older age groups like 11 to 14 and 15 to 16, enrollment has steadily gone up over the last decade and also continued to rise even during the period of school closures in the COVID years,” the 2022 report had said.