Status of education in Uttar Pradesh

(Source : Firstpost, ASER)

• A fourth of Uttar Pradesh’s (UP’s) 200 million people are aged between five and 14 years – India’s largest child population – but the state has the fewest teachers per student, the poorest transition rate from primary to upper primary school and amongst the lowest learning outcomes in the country.
• UP’s literacy rate of 69.72 percent is India’s eighth lowest in the country, according to Census 2011.
• Literacy rate rose 13.45 percentage points in UP over a decade from 2001, but there are wide regional disparities: In the north-eastern district of Shrawasti, the literacy rate is 49%, while in the best performing district, Ghaziabad (in north-western UP), it is 85%, according to this report.
• UP has the worst primary school pupil-teacher ratio in India
• India’s largest state by population has the worst pupil-teacher ratio (PTR) in India, with a teacher for every 39 students at the primary level, according to the Unified-District Information System for Education (U-DISE) Flash Statistics 2015-16. The all India average is 23:1.
• UP recorded an enrolment of 25.3 million primary students (including both private and government schools) in 2015-16, taught by 665,779 teachers (even including schools where primary, upper primary and secondary co-existed), according to government education data.
• At 30 students per teacher–as prescribed by the Right to Education Act (RTE)–at the primary level, the state should have 840,000 teachers but is short by 21%, or 176,000, according to our analysis.
• UP also reported the second-highest teacher absenteeism (31%) in rural public schools among 19 surveyed states in 2010, according to this 2014 study.UP spent Rs 13,102 per elementary school student, including both primary school students (grade I to V) and upper primary school students (grade VI to VIII), according to this commentary in the Economic and Political Weekly. This is higher than the all India spending of Rs 11,252 per student.55% of students in grade III could read a grade I text in 2014, compared to 50% students in 2006; in government schools, the proportion reduced from 24% in 2006 to 13% in 2010.In UP, few attend school regularly–on average, only 55% of children enrolled were present on the days the ASER team visited primary schools in 2014, according to ASERdata.
• According to this calculation by the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights, based on Census 2011 data: 624,000 children, or 8.4% of the five-14 age group.