// Documented social concern This entry records a difficult social reality. It is reported factually and, where evidence is cited, the source is given in the article.
Rajasthan has narrowed but not closed its literacy gender gap. In the fifth National Family Health Survey, just over half of women aged 15–49 were literate against roughly three-quarters of men in the same age band, and the gap widens in rural and more conservative districts where girls leave school earlier. The state has also historically recorded one of the lowest child sex ratios of any state, a consequence of sex-selective practices that improved through the 2010s but remain worse than the national figure.
The pattern tracks marriage age, household work and the distance to secondary schooling more than it does a single cause. Where the nearest secondary school is several kilometres away, the constraint on a girl’s schooling is transport and safety rather than fees; where early marriage is common, the constraint is the marriage itself. These operate together, and a district that ranks badly on one usually ranks badly on the others.
Schemes such as conditional cash transfers for girls’ schooling exist, and the state has run several, but their effect is measured in enrolment and retention data that improve only slowly. Enrolment is the easier half. The harder half is whether a girl who enrols stays through secondary school and whether she can read at the level her class implies — and the survey data on that is thinner than the enrolment data, which is why the gap is easier to describe than to close.
