Though Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao has been promising to provide quality education to the poor, by offering corporate level studies in government schools, the educational standards seems to be falling rapidly since last two years.

A latest report shows that staggering 60 per cent of Class 3 students unable to read a Class-1 level Telugu text. A 42.2 per cent Class 3 students cannot pronounce simple words in English.

These figures were revealed by the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2016 for rural areas in India. However, the report states that Class 8 students perform better at both language and arithmetic compared to Class 5 students.

The report shows that the Telugu reading ability of Class 5 government school students has decreased when compared to 2014, with only 40 per cent of them being able to read a Class 2-level text in 2016, against 53.7 per cent in 2014.

Private schools, however, appear to have shown an increase in Telugu reading ability from 55.7 per cent in 2014 to 59.1 per cent in 2016. But taken together, ability of Class 5 School students in government and private schools to read a Class 2 text fell from 54.5 per cent to 47.1 per cent.

A similar fall has been reported in the Telugu reading ability of Class 8 students. The number of Class 8 students who can read a Class 2 Telugu text fell from 73.9 per cent in 2014 to 71.7 per cent. 18.9 per cent of Class 2 students unable to read the English alphabet and some 32 per cent of Class 8 students unable to read easy sentences in English.

The percentage of Class 5 government school children who can perform arithmetic division fell from 29.5 per cent in 2014 to 26 per cent in 2016. The figure fell from 39.7 per cent to 37.6 per cent in private schools. Overall in Telangana, only 30.4 per cent of all Class 5 students can perform simple division of a three digit number by a single digit.