Aug 26, 2024 08:59 PM IST
Just like an element of competitiveness has crept in among the states over the SBA, so should happen in the case of NIPUN
Like with many other things, the Covid pandemic dealt a severe blow to students’ learning nationally. Children’s basic reading ability dropped to pre-2012 levels, reversing the slow improvement achieved in the intervening years. Drops were visible in both government and private schools in most states and for both boys and girls. Nationally, children’s basic arithmetic levels, too, declined over 2018 levels for most grades, although the decline is less steep and the picture is more varied than in the case of basic reading.
Faced with this reality, in July 2021, the government of India launched the country’s most ambitious mission to try and fix its crumbling public education edifice: National Initiative for Proficiency in Reading with Understanding and Numeracy (NIPUN) Bharat. The idea behind this mission is simple: Children must first learn to read before they read to learn, and some basic arithmetic skills are necessary for survival. At the time of the launch, I was horrified to learn that on a countrywide basis, 50 million children had been left behind the curve! The mission was initially to be completed by 2025, but the deadline has been extended by a year, to 2026-27.
Experts in the sector say that the Centre has done a fair bit to lay the groundwork for adoption (interested readers can take a look at tinyurl.com/mr3hbfvx), and the ball now lies firmly in the states’ courts. Interestingly, states such as Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh are doing better on this front, as they launched their initiatives even before NIPUN Bharat came to be, with the support of NGOs and civil society organisations such as Central Square Foundation, Pratham, Education Alliance, and Peepul.
In June, the first results post-launch of the mission from one of the early mover states, Madhya Pradesh, became publicly available. Data from the state shows that over 39% of Grade 3 students from over 4,500 schools have reached NIPUN standards in oral reading and fluency and are proficient in reading more than 45 words per minute. Over 22% of Grade 3 students are proficient in identifying numbers and performing two-digit subtraction. The numbers dip a bit for Grade 2 at 27% and 11%, respectively.
The competency in word reading increased from 18% to 34% over two years, indicating a growing ability among students to recognise and read words accurately. Sentence reading proficiency also saw a substantial rise, with 42% of students now able to read all three assessed sentences, up from 30% in 2022. Furthermore, oral reading fluency (ORF) improved from 17% to 23%. Competency in recognising two-digit numbers (up to 99) increased from 35% to 47%. The most dramatic rise was in the ability to subtract single digits without carryover (up to 20) from 18% to 65%, reflecting significant progress in basic subtraction skills. Perhaps the biggest leap was in competency in adding two-digit numbers without carryover (up to 20), surging from 25% to 75%. I’m not sure what readers think of this, but it certainly makes one wonder what the state was doing all these 75-odd years since Independence in the primary education arena!
Even as Madhya Pradesh celebrates its small success, there are a few things that the Centre could do to ensure states take up this mission with the seriousness it deserves. To begin with, the mission needs to be extended by at least another 10 years, as expecting universal or even 90% foundational literacy in five or six years is highly unrealistic.
Second, the extra financial support the Centre is providing for the mission needs to be extended for many years, probably well beyond the mission. As things stand, the Centre has set aside and is offering the states a budget of around ₹2,500 crore a year over and above the usual yearly support for school education. Almost 75% of this amount is being used for improved learning and teaching material for students. Studies have shown that often, underprivileged students make do with just a single dull textbook and lack the availability of storybooks, workbooks or any additional material that might make their learning more comprehensive and interesting. While this is a great step, it needs to continue well beyond the mission since the states’ own education budgets mostly go into paying teacher’s salaries.
Then, just like the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan (SBA), a similar awareness-building exercise can give a fillip to this mission. While there is awareness among those vested in the education field, parents, and other stakeholders are yet to grasp what is being attempted. At a countrywide level, parents, in fact, tend to be more lax about their ward’s education — even allowing them to skip a grade or not attend school at the drop of a hat for family celebrations or exigencies — in the early years, whereas all research shows that this is the time they need to be most vigilant. In many cases, parents not being literate themselves doesn’t help matters. Just like an element of competitiveness has crept in among the states over the SBA, so should happen in the case of NIPUN. Monitor how different states are performing, incentivise them to perform, and beat each other in this game.
And lastly, a controversial but a fairly critical aspect is that some kind of standardisation might be necessary in teaching. Teachers globally and in India resist scripted teaching plans, seeking flexibility and innovativeness. But clearly, in a country as vast and diverse as ours and where the quality of teachers is as varied as it gets, innovativeness has not taken us very far: The learning outcomes data attest to this. The Bridge International Academy (tinyurl.com/yvhnf3nr) type of approach — which has been successful in Kenya and has been adopted by Nigeria, Uganda, and even in a small way in the state of Andhra Pradesh — might be unpopular among the teaching community but unavoidable for a country like ours.
Anjuli Bhargava is a senior journalist who writes on governance, infrastructure and the social sector. The views expressed are personal
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