According to the latest Annual Status of Education Report 2018, only 44.2% of Class 5 students studying in government schools can read Class 2 level textbooks. In comparison to 2016 data recorded, there has been observed a 2.5 percentage increase in the data, and also in comparison with 2008 reports, there has been a decline in the rate, and an improvement has been observed since 2008.
This scenario was quite similar with the private schools as well. Since 2008, the ability of class 5 students to read class 2 level text in private schools has also declined from 67.9 percent in 2008 to 61.2 percent in 2012. Since 2012, the trend picked upward trend and in 2018, it reached 65.1 percent, which is still lesser than 2008 numbers. Since 2008 till 2018, private schools have consistently remained ahead of government schools.
The declining productivity of schools leads to a substantially smaller number of students learning to read basic texts by the time they reach class 5 every year. But, it does not necessarily mean that they find similar difficulty in higher classes. the proportion of ‘readers’ grows 1.4 or 1.5 times by the time they reach class 8 means that as children continue to use books, more they learn to read fluently even if not at the desired level.
As far as the reports are concerned, it has been suggested that efforts should be constantly made to improve the reading abilities of children by the time they reach Class 5.
In 2018, the highest reading abilities across the country have been reported from Himachal Pradesh (HP) at 74.5 percent followed by Kerala at 73.1 percent. The lowest among them is from Jharkhand with only 29.4 percent followed by Assam and Madhya Pradesh with 33.5 and 34.4 percent, report states.
“In 2012, the then Planning Commission acknowledged for the first time that there was a problem with learning outcomes, although the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) had been maintaining that learning levels had not gone down”, states the report.