Jagan calls Lokesh’s claim of 82.1% literacy in Andhra false, cites Centre’s survey showing 71.4%

YSR Congress Party (YSRCP) president and former Chief Minister Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy said IT and HRD Minister Nara Lokesh’s claim that Andhra Pradesh’s literacy rate had risen from 72.60% in 2024 to 82.10% in 2026 was shocking, since no literacy statistics for the calendar year 2026 had been released by any authority, the year being yet to end.

Mr. Lokesh had made the claim in a post on X on Tuesday (September 2, 2026), sharing a newspaper report to that effect. “I’m SUPER EXCITED to announce that AP has shot up in literacy to 82.1% in 2026 from 72.6% in 2024!” he wrote, adding that the State had been “among the lowest in India in 2024” when he took charge of the department.

In a post on X on Friday (September 4), Mr. Jagan said the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) for 2023-24, conducted by the National Sample Survey Office, had pegged the literacy rate of Andhra Pradesh at 72.60% for the age group seven years and above, and that the corresponding figure for 2018-19 was 69.10%.

The PLFS for the calendar year 2025 placed the State’s literacy rate at 71.40% in the same age group, he said. That document was published on July 2, 2026. He posted the relevant snippets from the three reports alongside.

“When things are so amply clear, for a Government to make false claims and attempt to hoodwink the people of the State is most unfortunate,” he wrote.

Mr. Jagan said that, in fact, enrolment in government schools had been falling and rising in private schools, according to the Government of India’s Unified District Information System for Education (UDISE+), because of policy changes brought in by the present State government. The UDISE+ table he posted showed enrolment in government schools falling from 40.50 lakh in 2023-24, the last year of his government, to 34.93 lakh in 2025-26, a drop of 5.57 lakh, while enrolment in private unaided schools rose by 2.87 lakh to 48.40 lakh. Total enrolment across all schools fell by 3.05 lakh over the two years.

He alleged that the government was not focused on making education more accessible to children from economically weaker backgrounds, and was instead making false claims.

“It is advisable that the Minister of Education devotes greater time and effort towards his department and not to red book governance,” he wrote, tagging Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu.