September 8 has been celebrated as the'International Literacy Day' across the world since 1967. The significance of this day arises from the fact that despite the steady rise in literacy rates over the past 50 years, there are still 773 million illiterate adults around the world. In India, though the literacy rate has seen phenomenal growth--from 18.3% to 74.4% between 1951 and 2018--there are 313 million illiterate people, according to the study, "Literacy in India: The gender and age dimension." Illiteracy and dropout rates are acutely linked. Dropping out of school is a rampant trend in India.

ITEM: A researcher at Telenor Group Research says he has developed a machine learning algorithm that uses mobile phone call records to determine literacy rates in developing markets by location. According to MIT Technology Review, researcher Pål Sundsøy says he started with a regular survey – conducted by a professional agency for a mobile operator – covering 76,000 mobile users in Asia that collected the user's mobile number and asked them if they could read. Sundsøy matched that data against the mobile operator's call data records, which enabled him to work out where each user was, who they called, for how long, etc. Then he crunched 75% of the correlated data to detect patterns with illiterate users, and used the remaining 25% to see if those patterns could identify illiterate people and areas where there is a higher proportion of illiterate people. All in all, he says, his machine learning algorithm can spot illiterate individuals with surprising accuracy.

One of the millennium development goals of the United Nations is to eradicate extreme poverty by 2030. That's a complex task, since poverty has many contributing factors. But one of the more significant is the 750 million people around the world who are unable to read and write, two-thirds of which are women. There are plenty of organizations that can help, provided they know where to place their resources. So identifying areas where literacy rates are low is an important challenge.