The dream of 100% literacy
Last month our Chief Minister announced that Andhra Pradesh would achieve 100% literacy by the year 2020. This is an important objective, because our state has not been doing well on the literacy front. Here are some sobering figures. The national average literacy rate is 74%. The southern states, Kerala, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu have literacy rate of 93.91%, 75.6% and 80.33 respectively. In comparison the literacy rate in Andhra Pradesh is a mere 67.41% and in Telengana it is 66.5%. Educational infrastructure is improving The primary schools in our Agency Areas such as Araku, Paderu and Chintapalli are run by the Integrated Tribal Development Authority (ITDA) based in Paderu. Over the past many years the government has been injecting substantial financial resources into the area to build up infrastructure such as school buildings, roads, health, electricity and water supply. Even though we have the physical infrastructure in place we are unable to deliver q...