India: Literate, but cannot read

[Harold Schiffman]

 Literate but cannot read
2
2 Feb 2008, 0001 hrs IST,Brij Kothari

According to the 2001 census, India's literacy rate for the
population, aged seven and above, was 65.4 per cent. What does this
number really mean? Can 561 million people, that this rate implies,
read a newspaper headline in their own language? Not really. What it
means is that households across India reported 65.4 per cent of its
members to be "literate", when the census fieldworker showed up. The
literacy rate is a perceptual number — people perceived to be
literate. It is not an accurate indicator of the proportion of readers
in the population.

What if the national census actually tested for reading ability? We
did just that, with a sample of around 20,000 people drawn from 3,200
randomly chosen households in four Hindi states — Rajasthan, UP, MP
and Bihar. First we followed the census approach. Then we asked every
household member, aged seven and above, to read a simple text in
Hindi, of 35 words, that a student in class three would be expected to
read. Those who could read it correctly, at their own pace, were
marked as readers.

Those who could read only parts of it, or took recourse to sounding
syllables before putting together words, were classified as
"early-readers". The rest were non-readers, who could not read at all.
 The census approach gave us a literacy rate of 68.7 per cent in the
sample. The reading test, in sharp contrast, resulted in 26 per cent
readers, 27 per cent early-readers and 47 per cent non-readers.
Even if one were to club the readers and early-readers, at best 53 per
cent could be considered to be readers. The census method, thus, led
to an overestimation of the literacy rate, in the Hindi states, by a
whopping 16 per cent.

Why is there such a big overestimation? First, in the 1990s, the
National Literacy Mission did a remarkable job of drumming up interest
in literacy and started off millions of people on the path to
literacy. Once someone acquires beginning alphabetic knowledge, that
person becomes "literate" in family and self-perception, for life, and
therefore, in the census. The 1990s added nearly 100 million
perceptual literates, permanently to the census. Many of them,
however, never quite attained functional reading ability or relapsed
quickly into non-reading in a lifelong sense.

Second, our data show that 90 per cent of those who completed first
grade, were automatically reported as literate. First grade completion
is now very high among children aged 6-14, because enrolment itself,
nationally, is over 93 per cent. So whether a child can read or not,
if you can get her to enrol and complete first grade, she immediately
joins the ranks of the literate.  Yet, our testing found that, at
first grade, less than 1 per cent were actually able to read a simple
paragraph, 27 per cent read it like an early-reader, and 72 per cent
could not read at all. Even after the completion of grade five, 26 per
cent could not read at all and only 12 per cent could read it
comfortably.

These two reasons explain why the literacy rate is galloping but not
the ability to read. For the latter to improve, national policymakers
would need to draw upon innovative strategies that can make lifelong
reading, inescapable at a mass level.

One such strategy that we have been advocating for national policy
adoption, is Same Language Subtitling (SLS).

Essentially, SLS is the idea of adding karaoke-like subtitles to film
song-based content on TV, in the same language as the audio. SLS is
well-researched and proven to improve reading ability, is
cost-effective, and causes automatic and lifelong reading.

SLS allows a school-going child to pick up emerging reading skills in
school and right away practise them at home. This constant interplay
of school learning and home practice of an essential skill, such as
reading, deserves more policy attention.

In the census we have 260 million so-called "literate" people who
cannot read. National progress ultimately depends on their ability to
read, not our ability to call them literate.

(The writer is an adjunct professor at IIM, Ahmedabad.)


http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Opinion/Editorial/Literate_but_cannot_read/articleshow/2802603.cms
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