Road to Viksit Bharat runs through a strengthened NIPUN Bharat

Doubling down on the National Initiative for Proficiency in Reading with Understanding and Numeracy will yield long-lasting growth multipliers

- ASHISH DHAWAN & RAJIV MEMANI

Children entering India’s Balvatikas and pre-primary classrooms this year will turn 24 in 2047. They are the builders, leaders, and enablers of a Viksit Bharat.

Economists have found that the drivers of long-term growth are not years of schooling but rather the quality of schooling. They show that improving a nation’s learning levels by one standard deviation leads to roughly two percentage points of additional GDP growth.

A basic building block for children to be able to learn at higher levels of schooling is foundational literacy and numeracy (FLN) — the ability of a child to read with meaning, write with understanding and solve basic arithmetic problems such as addition and subtraction by Grade 3.

To achieve FLN across the country, the government launched the National Initiative for Proficiency in Reading with Understanding and Numeracy (NIPUN Bharat) Mission in July 2021. Its first five years have demonstrated the government’s ability to institutionalise FLN. The next phase must build decisively on this foundation by deepening what has worked, resourcing what is new, and cementing hard-won gains. The success of NIPUN’s next five years is critical in the march to a Viksit Bharat.

Green shoots of progress via NIPUN are clearly visible. The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2024 records the sharpest improvement in foundational learning India has seen in two decades. Grade 3 numeracy is up seven percentage points since 2022, and reading is up three percentage points. NCERT’s national assessment, PARAKH Rashtriya Sarvekshan (PRS) 2024, confirms the trend.

According to PARAKH, Grade 3 students score an average of 64 per cent in language and 60 per cent in mathematics nationally.