Educational attainment and growing up of unmarried youth in selected states of India: A gendered perspective

This paper tries to study the gender differences in educational status of unmarried youth in India and to find out the role of education and gender on process of growing up using the data from “Youth in India: Situation and Needs 2006-2007”. Bi-variate and multi-variate techniques are used to find out the level of literacy among youth, reasons for not attending the school, gender differences in dropping out in school and percent distribution of type of school in various states and sex. Result shows that one fifth youth in Bihar are illiterate against only 1 percent in selected southern states. Main reason for non- attendance of schools in Bihar are economic. Majority of the youth are attending government schools. Maximum number of youth discusses about their school performance with father is relatively more than with mother. A huge gender gap is visible in discussion of growing up issues with parents. When more than 70 percent girls discuss it with mother, it is rather negligible by young boys. The multinomial logistic regression analysis shows that good communication with father is found to be significantly higher among male compared to females and also highly significant with the higher level of education. Less communication with father shows similar result.