Madhya Pradesh’s tribal-dominated Mandla region has become the first fully “functionally literate” district in the country, state Minister Bisahulal Singh has announced.

The state minister of food and civil supplies made the statement while addressing a gathering at an Independence Day function on Monday.

Speaking about the achievement, Mandla collector Harshika Singh said the literacy rate in the district was 68 per cent as per a survey in 2011, while another report in 2020 pointed out that over 2.25 lakh people were not literate in the district and most of them were tribals living in the forest areas, Mandla collector Harshika Singh said.

Tribals frequently complained to the authorities about money being taken from their bank accounts by fraudsters and the root cause of this was that they were not functionally literate, the official said.

A person can be called functionally literate when he or she is able to write his or her own name, to count and read and write in Hindi.

Keeping this in mind, we launched a major campaign to make them functionally literate from Independence Day 2020 by roping in the school education department, women and child development department, anganwadi and social workers to educate women and senior citizens, the collector said.

Within two years, the entire district has become functionally literate, she said, claiming that people were able to write their names, count and read, making Mandla the first district in the country to achieve this distinction.