Vol. 3, Issue 6, Part S (2017)

Economical development of a society is strongly dependent on few socio-economic factors. Among them literacy most probably the most indispensable one. Developed countries are become developed because of their high literacy rate among both male and female and in case of underdeveloped countries the situation is vice-versa. Therefore, literacy is the decisive factor for development and population control and inequality in literacy leads to various socio-economic problems. Despite our governments trying to erase the disparity in literacy between male and female, women are still far behind and there exist a large gender bias in the study area. Hence, through the present paper wehave tried to evaluate the literacy disparity between male and female.

To analyse the gender-disparity rate of 21 block of Paschim Medinipur, we consider the total literacy rate of the study area during 2001 to 2011. The gender disparity in the leveis of literacy has been found with the help of Gender Disparity Index (after David Sopher, 1980). We have observed the blocks namely - Pingla, Sabang, Chandrakona -I Daspur -I, Daspur - II (2001) has lower rate of literacy disparity, where the others show either medium or high literacy disparity. We also calculated the changing rate of literacy disparity during 2001 to 2011. We also tried to find out the major findings from the survey and reasons behind the literacy disparity.