Schoolkids in villages fare poorly in reading Punjabi

Only 34% students of Class III at Punjab Government schools in rural areas can read a Class II-level text, reveals the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER)-2024 for Rural India.

However, government schools have performed better than private ones when it comes to reading ability and solving the arithmetic problems.

Shockingly, over 15% of the Class III students, both of government and private schools, can just read alphabets in Gurmukhi script but not words, and 4.6% students couldn’t even read Punjabi letters.

Punjab betters national average on infra front

• Mid-Day meal was served in 97.4% of the schools, compared with the national figure of 91.9%
• 2.8% of the schools surveyed had no library compared with the national figure of 17.5%
• 81.2% had useable toilets against the national average of 79%
• 77% of the schools have separate usable toilets for girls against the national average of 72%
• 31.7% students use computers against national average of 11.1%

The survey on learning levels of children in rural Punjab revealed that 28% per cent of Class III students can read Class I-level text while only 34% of them were able to read Class II-level text.

The zonal manager for ASER in Punjab, Prabhsimran Singh said 600 villages, 11,967 households and 20,226 children in the age group of 3 to 16 were part of the rural survey. “Though there has been a significant improvement in solving arithmetic problems, the reading abilities still remain a cause for concern,” he said.

In terms of solving arithmetic problems, at least 51% of government schools could do subtraction. Since the 2022 survey, government schools have gained by 3.4% in terms of reading ability when compared with private schools, who have seen a drop of 0.9% per cent.

Only 40.3% students in private schools were able to read properly against 41.2% since 2022.