HYDERABAD: International Literacy Day is coming to Telangana due to the inadequacy of a student who has been studying in school for five years but cannot read class 2 texts. A state may rate more people as literate while school assessments continue to show poor performance because the two measure different things. The more difficult question is whether this number describes what a person can actually do.
“The literacy rate is definitely increasing. But the very definition of literacy is very narrow,” said R. Venkat Reddy, national director of the MV Foundation, which fights child labor and defends children’s right to full-time school education. His work is directly related to children, whose presence in school should lead to real learning. “Just signing up isn’t enough. Going to school isn’t enough.”
According to the Periodic Labor Force Survey 2025, the literacy rate among people aged seven years and above in Telangana is 74.6 percent, compared to 81.1 percent for all India. This figure measures the literacy of the population. It does not test whether students can read at grade level or understand what they encounter in the textbook. UNESCO itself views literacy as a continuum that includes reading, writing, numeracy, comprehension, interpretation and communication.
Access presents a different picture. According to the Union Education Ministry’s Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), 2.5 percent of Telangana’s rural residents aged 15 to 16 years were out of school in 2024, compared to 7.9 percent nationally. Low rates of school exclusion and poor learning can co-exist. Reddy saw this failure as a child rights issue. He said teaching should be appropriate to the child’s age and grade level and called poor learning outcomes “also a violation of the child’s rights.” Schools, he said, need suitable teachers, equipment and teaching aids. He also called for increased public investment in schooling and linked the growth of private schooling to parents seeking alternatives when public provision does not meet their expectations.
Gusti J. Nohria, President, Hyderabad Public Schools Society, highlighted the problem of literacy among children from underprivileged families. Nohria said the ability to read, comprehend and communicate confidently can impact how these children perform throughout their education. He argued that schools have a responsibility to support these skills among children who have fewer educational advantages.
Moreover, Akunuri Murali, a retired IAS officer and former chairman of the Telangana Education Commission, blamed the low literacy rate on governments, which he alleged had failed to monitor basic education closely enough. “We need to make every school in this country a literacy-free school,” he said.
Murali’s recipe was deliberately detailed. He wanted FLN (basic literacy and literacy) to be tracked “school by school, student by student.” He also rejected adult literacy programs as a replacement for a school system that taught children correctly in the first place. “Functional literacy may serve a limited purpose,” he said, but “literacy comes with education.” His criticism extended to political parties, which he said had failed to give literacy and education the necessary priority.