KASKI: The Gandaki provincial government is going to declare Gandaki a literate province.

The province will be declared a literate state with a special ceremony in Pokhara on Saturday, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Science, Technology and Social Development said in a press conference here on Friday.

The announcement ceremony will be held in the presence of Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba, said Mekhlal Shrestha, coordinator of the ceremony organizing committee and Minister for Education, Culture, Science, Technology and Social Development.

The declaration is being made in accordance with the policy of declaring the region, district or nation where 95 percent of the citizens in the age group of 15 to 60 years are literate. He said that the average literacy rate of Gandaki was 96.57 percent.

The meeting of the provincial council of ministers held on September 15 had decided to declare Gandaki as a literate province.
Chief of the Education Division of the Ministry, Toynath Lamsal, shared that the government has launched a nationwide ‘Literate Nepal Campaign’ as a campaign to make illiterate people literate by conducting an on-site household survey.

According to the Education and Human Development Center, Nawalpur in Gandaki has the highest literacy rate of 98 percent. Lamjung has the lowest literacy rate at 95.5 percent.

At the district level, all the districts have already been declared literate. Mustang has been declared the first literate district.
The government launched a school enrollment campaign last year to make all citizens literate and to enroll children above the age of five.