Hyderabad: The state government would enrol students to become teachers and educate their illiterate parents and grandparents at home in order to improve the adult literacy rate. This has been initiated as a pilot project by the adult education department and would be flagged off on September 8, International Literacy Day.
As a part of this pilot programme, active and voluntary involvement of students is required to identify and pick one illiterate parent or grandparent as the ‘learner’. Students would have to teach the learner on a daily basis, based on the two basic books they would be provided with.
The content of these books has been specially designed for this purpose, and covers basic reading, writing and number skills.
Students from the 6th standard onwards can participate in the programmes. Interested students would have to go through training on how to teach their chosen learners. The total duration of the programme would be 200 hours, after which an assessment test would be conducted by the child’s school. The adult learners must pass a test to be officially considered literate.
School principals would be required to prepare a plan of action, monitor, coordinate and evaluate the students as part of programme. As this is a pilot project, only a few government schools would be implementing it as of now.
Telangana has 104 lakh adult non-literates
The state government would enrol students to become teachers and educate their illiterate parents and grandparents at home in order to improve the adult literacy rate.
This programme was started to improve the overall literacy rate of Telangana state, which stands at 66.4 per cent, against the national average of 73 per cent, as per the 2011 census, and is ranked a lowly 32nd in literacy among all states and union territories. Though the state recorded 100 per cent literacy rate among school-going children, the overall literacy percentage is dragged down by low adult literacy rate.
According to the adult education department, there are about 104 lakh adult non-literates in the state. Since there are about 72 lakh students in various schools and colleges, the programme hopes, they can help convert the 104 lakh non-literates in the state into literates soon.
It is aimed that even if one student targets one illiterate person, the adult illiteracy rate would fall drastically and the overall literacy rate of the state would go further by the next census.
