An excerpt from ‘Heartland Rising: The Making of Majoritarian India’

It is relevant that Uttar Pradesh and Bihar have consistently been privileged, that their chronic failure to develop is concealed under a carapace of opacity, hiding important aspects of State development in order to enhance the weightage it would receive under the Finance Commission. The Union government has deliberately manipulated and diluted the data for this purpose. To take one example, there is the matter of literacy rates. In Uttar Pradesh, the literacy rate appears to have increased substantially from 1951 to 2011, from around 12 per cent to 68 per cent. However, one must be wary of such figures, as the definition India employs to define a literate person is an outlier. To be considered literate in India, one only has to be able to read and write their own name; this requires a very limited notion of the alphabet. If your name is Shiv, for example, you only need to know four letters. The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) released in January 2024 shows that more than 50 per cent of fourteen-to eighteen-year-old children in rural India are unable to solve a simple three-digit division problem that is taught in class III. Literacy skills are not much better, as from the same sample over 25 per cent were unable to read class II level textbooks and just shy of 50 per cent could not read sentences in English. Of those who could read, 26.5 per cent did not understand what they were reading. These are very damning statistics and point to population growth being an impending disaster rather than the much-vaunted demographic dividend envisaged by economists and politicians.