Quote:
Originally Posted by CommonReader
That study fails to meet basic plausibility criteria. According to the CIA World Factbook India has a literacy rate of only 61 %. Whatever the real figure may be, India obviously has a massive problem with illiteracy. Yet we are supposed to believe that of all countries people read most in India on average?
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Whilst I would certainly agree that the accuracy of these figures is only as good as the veracity of their origin—it’s hard to know how they’ve been collected and what they are based on, I disagree that India couldn’t top the list.
The literacy rate in India may only be 61%, I actually suspect it’s probably much lower than that, you need to consider that that is 61% of what is probably by now more than a billion people. That’s 610 million literate people, just under twice the total population of the USA and 10 times the population of the UK. Most of those people won't have the modern distractions those two developed countries have.
Factor in the poverty, the variable electricity infrastructure and power outages and lack of power in many rural areas, the lack of affordability of televisions, games consoles, DVDs, internet etc for large swathes of the population and it becomes fairly self evident how India could quite easily top that list.