Socio-economic status and female literacy in India

Abstract It seems as if the universally acclaimed need for literacy has recently re-gained currency in India, justifying enormous investment in areas traditionally scorned for their low rate of return. The focus on increased enrolment, retention and achievement in primary education, in conjunction with feverish Total Literacy Campaigns conducted by the Government of India (GOI), may be credited with steering the spotlight away from more pressing structural problems such as the deeply ingrained gender bias at all levels of the education-employment matrix and the inherently gendered nature of the ideological framework underlying educational provision in India. Seldom questioned is the value and relevance of the kind of literacy being advocated or the logic behind the slogan ‘basic education as a basic human need’. It can be argued that churning out batches of literate women does not guarantee the articulation of their needs or their participation in planning and decision making. This paper argues that, divorced from other areas such as women's low socio-economic status, labour market inequalities and legal bias, literacy programmes are a relatively inexpensive and politically expedient palliative in their present limited form.