What is 919/6? More than half of Class VIII rural students do not know, according to ‘The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2018’
- While there has been some improvement in the reading and arithmetic skills of lower primary students in rural India over the last decade, the skills of Class VIII students have actually seen a decline.
- The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2018, the results of a yearly survey that NGO Pratham has been carrying out since 2006, shows that more than half of Class VIII students cannot correctly solve a numerical division problem and more than a quarter of them cannot read a primary level text.
- The overall statistics also camouflage wide differences in skill level between States, or even between students in a single classroom.
- The ASER survey covered almost 5.5 lakh children between the ages of 3 and 16 in 596 rural districts across the country.
- In an encouraging trend, it found that enrolment is increasing and the percentage of children under 14 who are out of school is less than 4%.
- The gender gap is also shrinking, even within the older cohort of 15-and-16-year-olds.
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