Here are some of the shocking details from the study carried out by Pratham and is widely considered one of the most authentic data on the state of rural education.
The percentage of children in class 3 in government or private schools who can read class 2 level textbooks has dropped from 19% in 2018 to 9% in 2022. Performance of girls (9.6%) in 2022 is better than boys (7.5%).
In arithmetic, the proportion of children in class V who can do division has also fallen from 21% in 2018 to 13% in 2022. In reading English, the percentage of children who could read sentences has fallen 5% in class 5 to 20% and 2% in class 8 to 48% since 2016.
While the rest of the country did not have an ASER survey in 2020 due to Covid-19, Karnataka did. The values for the state are worse in 2022. The good part is that the average teacher attendance increased from 89.9% in 2018 to 92.6% in 2022 and average student attendance increased from 84.1% to 87.5% in 2022.
Karnataka is way ahead of the national percentages on these fronts. The department of public instruction, however, denied that the learning recovery prog r a m m e hasn’t had its impact. “Had we not rolled out the Kalika Chetarike programme, our results would have been much worse. The programme has pulled us up by many points, which could have been worse. Since we realise that it has not been up to the normal level, we are seriously mooting at launching Kalika Chetarike 2.0,” said Vishal R, commissioner, DPI.
