ISLAMABAD: The literacy rate in Pakistan has increased slightly to 63%, from 61 percent as per the Pakistan Economic Survey. This is barely any improvement in the face of gaping rifts among genders, urban and rural regions, and different provinces in Pakistan.
Men’s literacy rate is 73% whereas women literacy rate stands at 54%, making for a gap of 19% points which has remained more or less constant over the years. Similarly, disparity between urban and rural literacy rates is as wide as can be. Urban literacy rate is 74% while rural Pakistan’s literacy rate is 55%. The picture is even bleaker when looked into closer. Urban male literacy rate stands at 81% and that of urban women, often touted as one of the success stories in education efforts in Pakistan, is 68%, while rural men’s literacy rate is 67% and rural women literacy rate is 44%.
Punjab Ahead, Balochistan Lagging
Punjab leads with 68% participation. Sindh and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa have participation rates of 58% each. On the other hand, Balochistan remains last at 49%, a rate that has hardly changed in any of the survey cycles and is due to a province where girls regularly leave school after primary education, distance to schools can be measured in kilometers, and safety considerations sometimes lead to school closures.
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The story does not get any better regarding the spread between provinces. Urban Punjab clocks in at 78%, the highest amongst all sub-categories within the nation. Rural Sindh sits at 39%, the lowest. There is a spread of 39 percentage points from the worst to the best performer within Pakistan. This spread cannot be bridged by a single budget cycle.
Two Points in How Many Years?
A two-point national gain sounds like progress. When one nation gains between three and four million people per year, keeping the literacy level constant means gaining an extra half a million or so literate adults every year. It is true achievement of sorts to raise the rate from 61 to 63% despite this demographic obstacle.
Yet two percentage points is also a number that raises another query: how long will it take, at this speed, for Pakistan reach 75%? The arithmetic is not encouraging.
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Regional peers have moved faster. Bangladesh crossed 75% literacy years ago. India sits above 77%. Pakistan, with a younger population and therefore a theoretically larger window to educate its way forward, continues to underperform the neighbourhood.
The Economic Survey data points to where the problem concentrates: rural women, Balochistan, and rural Sindh. These are not new findings. They appear in survey after survey. What changes slowly, if at all, is the policy response proportionate to the scale of the problem.
Until girls in rural Sindh finish school at the same rate as boys in urban Lahore or anything approaching it Pakistan’s headline literacy figure will keep inching upward one or two points at a time, and the country will keep reading about its own education crisis in annual surveys that document the same gaps with slightly different numbers.
