Year after year, Pratham’s Annual Survey of Education Report, or ASER, tells us about children who go to school but can’t read or do basic math. This year, as ASER volunteers fan out across 570 rural districts, Uma Vishnu visits a village in Rampur, a district in UP with some of the worst learning levels in the country, to see what it is to read.
Aao, padho." Kusum, who had until then been stirring a cowdung slurry, looks up at the crowd of people who have just barged into her house. Read? No one had ever told her to do that. Not in school, where she sits in the back row of Class IX; definitely not at home. "My parents are away," she protests, a thin brown film of the slurry coating her arms all the way up to the elbow. "That’s ok. Go wash your hands and try reading this," goads Chandrika Prasad Maurya.
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