The basic reading and arithmetic ability of five to 16-year-old students across the country significantly dropped in 2022 as schools opened after the coronavirus pandemic, according to the Annual Status of Education Report released on Wednesday.
The findings were made through a nationwide citizen-led rural household survey that covered nearly 7 lakh children in over 19,000 villages across 616 districts in the country. The Annual Status of Education Report survey was last conducted in 2018.
The basic reading ability, which is measured by whether a child can read letters, words, a simple paragraph at Class 1 level of difficulty or a story at Class 2 level of difficulty, dropped to pre-2012 levels, the report said on Wednesday.
The percentage of children enrolled in Class 3 in government or private schools who can read at Class 2 level of difficulty dropped from 27.3% in 2018 to 20.5% in 2022. The decline was more than 10% in states such as Telangana, Kerala, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana and Andhra Pradesh that had higher reading levels in 2018.
Meanwhile, the proportion of children enrolled in Class 5 in government or private schools who can read a Class 2 level text fell from 50.5% in 2018 to 42.8% in 2022, the report added.
According to the report, children’s…
