MEASUREMENT OF INTER-GROUP INEQUALITY IN LITERACY: AN INTER-STATE ANALYSIS

Wide spread regional differences in educational achievement in India as a matter of concern has drawn attention of planner and policy makers addressing questions of development divide across regions. This has led to the recognition of educational inequality as a potential contributor towards the development divide and gained prominence as one of the policy objective of national as well as provincial governments. In this regard, an assessment of the nature, extent and intensity of educational inequality assumes significance. Literacy rate, the most fundamental and widely used indicator of educational development, being a mean centric measure ignore the distributional dimension of group disparity. With this pre-text, present paper is an attempt to analyse the extent of disparity in literacy rate across Indian state accounting for the inter-group inequality. Two different Index, one based on the Atkinson’s social welfare function approach and other Gini-type inequality index have been used to compute the inter-group inequality adjusted literacy deprivation index. The analysis reflects a significant scaling of group-inequality adjusted literacy rate over unadjusted which indicates the significant welfare loss due to the unequal distribution.