NIPUN Bharat 2.0: Rewriting the education story

Reforming one of the world’s largest and most diverse education systems would not have been possible without the pivotal unveiling of India’s child-centred, ambitious and futuristic National Education Policy 2020. Aimed at ensuring every child in India masters basic reading, writing, and arithmetic by Grade 3, the mission aligns with the NEP 2020’s urgent call: “Our highest priority must be to achieve universal foundational literacy and numeracy by 2026-27. By providing key enablers like high quality culturally contextualised content, augmented capacity building of teachers, engaging and joyful play-based pedagogies, robust observation-based assessments for measuring learning outcomes, active parental engagement initiatives, and data-driven monitoring systems, the mission is systematically transforming and reshaping teaching and learning practices for India's five crore early grade students in the government school system. The Economic Survey 2024-25 states that through NIPUN Bharat, the “education system is deploying innovative pedagogies and teaching methods to ensure that every child achieves FLN.” The impact of the NIPUN Bharat Mission is already becoming evident in the recent ASER 2024 survey where, for the first time in two decades, India’s government schools have recorded significant improvements in both literacy and numeracy among Grade 3 students. As the NIPUN Bharat Mission continues to provide holistic quality education across India’s 7.36 lakh primary schools, its early successes must not be seen as the end, but rather as the beginning of a larger, more ambitious vision.