Himachal is marked fully literate at 99.55 percent, second only to Goa

Himachal Pradesh on Tuesday received national recognition as a fully literate state under the Centre's New India Literacy Programme, known as ULLAS. Education Minister Rohit Thakur took the honour in New Delhi from Union Minister of State Jayant Choudhary on International Literacy Day. The state now puts its literacy rate at 99.55 percent, second in the country after Goa at 99.7 percent.

Himachal was declared fully literate on 8 September 2025 at 99.3 percent. The extra two-tenths of a point in a year is the product of the same adult-literacy drive, not a new census. Thakur said a population of 75.26 lakh now includes 28,480 people still counted as non-literate. That residual is the work that remains after the certificate is framed.

How the state got from 5 percent to this number

At Independence Himachal's literacy rate was about 5 percent when the all-India figure was about 13 percent. The 1951 count put the state at 7.98 percent. Thakur credited the first chief minister, Yashwant Singh Parmar, and the governments that followed for building schools in a hill state where a village can sit a ridge away from the next road.

ULLAS, started in the state in 2023-24, is the adult layer on top of that school system. Officials identified 94,930 learners and put them on the ULLAS portal. They registered and trained 19,232 volunteer teachers and ran the programme in all 12 districts. Three Foundational Literacy and Numeracy Assessment Tests followed. Of 61,542 learners assessed, 59,896 passed, a pass rate of 97.3 percent. State figures also say that more than 66,000 of the original 94,930 identified non-literate adults were made literate between September 2024 and March 2026.

Full literacy, in the Union education ministry's current use, is a functional threshold rather than a claim that every adult reads at secondary-school level. The FLNAT tests reading, writing and basic numbers. A pass moves a person out of the non-literate column. That is the definition behind 99.55 percent.

What the leftover 28,480 implies

A hill state can put a school on most ridges and still miss older adults who never sat in one, seasonal workers who move, and people with disabilities whom the volunteer network did not reach. Thakur said the next phase is to hold the gain and add digital and vocational skills under the same ULLAS label. That is a different job from teaching an adult to sign a form.

Goa remains ahead by a thin margin. Other states that have taken the same honour sit on similar adult-literacy campaigns rather than on a new census enumerator walking every house. The 2031 census, when it comes, will be the first independent check of these certificates.

For Tuesday the political fact is simpler. A state that started near the bottom of the literacy table has been told, on the day the world marks the skill, that it now sits second. The 28,480 names still on the non-literate list are the only measure that will tell whether the certificate holds.