Onlykashmir.in News Desk
Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha announced on Tuesday that Jammu and Kashmir has joined the league of fully literate states and union territories under the Government of India’s ULLAS scheme, achieving an impressive 99.09 per cent success rate in what officials are calling a landmark achievement for the region’s education sector.
In a social media post, the Lieutenant Governor said Jammu and Kashmir’s success rate makes it the largest population region in the country to attain this literacy milestone, a distinction that underscores the scale of the effort required to bring near universal literacy to a union territory with a large and geographically dispersed population spanning remote mountainous districts as well as urban centres.
Sinha congratulated teachers, administrators and all stakeholders involved in the mission for their contribution towards the achievement, underscoring that education remains the strongest force for empowerment available to any society. His remarks reflect the administration’s continued emphasis on education as a central pillar of its development agenda for Jammu and Kashmir in recent years.
The ULLAS scheme, formally known as Understanding Lifelong Learning for All in Society, is the Central Government’s flagship adult education programme aimed at eliminating illiteracy among adults aged 15 and above. The scheme focuses not only on foundational literacy and numeracy but also on critical life skills, digital literacy, financial literacy and vocational skills, reflecting a broader shift in adult education policy away from rote literacy metrics towards functional empowerment.
Achieving full literacy status under the scheme requires a union territory or state to cross a defined threshold of literacy coverage among its adult population, a target that involves extensive grassroots mobilization, volunteer teaching efforts and sustained monitoring by district and block level education authorities. Officials associated with the programme in Jammu and Kashmir have credited a combination of teacher training initiatives, community outreach and local administrative coordination for the successful outcome.
The Lieutenant Governor called for continued collective efforts to further strengthen the mission of education across the union territory, signalling that the administration views the ULLAS achievement as a foundation to build upon rather than a final destination. Education officials say sustained focus will now shift towards consolidating these literacy gains and ensuring that newly literate adults continue to have access to further learning opportunities, in line with the scheme’s broader lifelong learning objectives.
