India, Oct. 9 -- India has made significant progress in closing gender gaps in education, but a stark rural-urban divide continues to leave girls substantially behind boys at the upper-secondary level, with only 59 girls completing school for every 100 boys in rural areas, according to a new UNESCO Global Education Monitoring (GEM) report released in Paris on Friday.

The report titled 'Gender Equity in Access to Education,' said girls remain disadvantaged in India overall, with an adjusted gender parity index of 0.89 for upper-secondary completion.

The Gender Parity Index (GPI) is a socio-economic metric used to measure the relative access to education of males and females, calculated by dividing the number of female students by the num...