Today being world literacy day, I suppose it needs to be said that the literacy figures for India are simply abysmal. For women in particular it is about 60%.
But the really bad news is that that really isn’t a real estimate of how many can actually read and write in India. When there was a lot of angst expressed over how India houses almost half the world’s illiterates, the government got down to work on it — of course Indian style.
They created a new official definition for ‘literacy.’ By this unique Indian method, anyone who can read and write their name is officially counted as literate!! So Sita who can write S I T A, but doesn’t know the alphabets, can’t read and write anything else, considers herself literate.
I know because there is a Sit a who worked as part-time domestic help for a year. She was…
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