Southern states have much higher percentage of women graduates

At 60% of the total number of graduates, Kerala has the highest percentage of female graduates

A much higher percentage of women in southern states are completing graduation than their northern neighbors, recently released census data for the decade leading to 2011 has revealed.

While showing that penetration of college level education varies greatly across different states, the results also point to broad factors such as geographical and socio-economic divisions.

If the age group of 20-24 is considered as the optimum age for graduating, southern states had a much higher percentage of graduates. 60% of all graduating individuals were women in Kerala. The census divides college or equivalent education into graduate, technical diploma and non-technical diploma courses.

Karnataka had the highest percentage of its female population graduating at 52.82 per cent along with 18.3 per cent in Tamil Nadu and 13.91 per cent in Andhra Pradesh. Compared to this, Punjab had 15.97 per cent of its females graduating while in Rajasthan it was 8.86 per cent. Haryana had only a meager 6.46 per cent of its females graduating.

But there were anomalies as well, whereas 47.03 percentage of women in the concerned age group graduated in Gujarat, in Kerala the corresponding figure was only 23.38 per cent.

However, men still beat women to technical and non-technical diploma courses across states. But that gap has also dwindled significantly this time, evident from the fact that the number of women with technical diplomas (not degrees) stands at nearly 19 lakh, up 146% in a decade. The number of men holding such degrees is more than 53 lakh.

Among the total population in the concerned age group, 20.08 per cent of people graduated in Kerala followed by Tamil Nadu (18.36 per cent) and Andhra Pradesh (16.56 per cent). On the other hand, states from northern and western India like Gujarat (12.5 per cent) and Punjab (15 per cent) had a lower percentage of the concerned population having graduate or equivalent qualifications.

States with a conventionally higher per capita level of earning or those conventionally considered to be more developed generally pipped their poorer counterparts. Poorer states, on the other hand scored quite low with Jharkhand having 7.88 per cent of its concerned population as graduates. Odisha (6.93 per cent) and Bihar (6.56 per cent) trailed the list.

However, Haryana bucked this trend with a lowly 6.83 per cent of the concerned population holding such qualifications points towards other social factors at play.

India had 1.31 crore people in 2011 who were graduates. This is a marginal increase of one percentage point over the last census. The overwhelming majority of students are seen to be pursuing simple technical graduate courses although the gap between technical and non technical education has narrowed in the last decade.

Figures released by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) in June had also corroborated this trend by saying out of every 1,000 eligible students, i.e in the age bracket of 15 -29 years, an overwhelming 850 students were pursuing general studies. The NSSO survey, conducted only across a select number of households nationally, reported that a further 126 students attended technical or professional courses while 24 were enrolled in vocational courses.

The census data lists 1.86 crore Indians in the age bracket of 20-24 as illiterate. Moreover, more than 1.65 crore have educational qualifications commensurate with primary and 1.68 crore have secondary level standards.