India stands at a rare inflection point. To become a developed nation by 2047, we need sustained, broad-based economic growth and our strongest asset in achieving it is our demographic dividend – a young, working-age population larger than almost any other in the world. But a dividend only pays off if that workforce actually has the capabilities to use it. That is where education becomes the lever on which everything else turns.
Against this backdrop, the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 stands as the most consequential education reform of the last decade: it set off a chain of structural changes that are now visible inside classrooms, curricula and state education departments across the country.
Six of these transformations stand out. The 5+3+3+4 structure aligned schooling with children’s developmental stages, enabling age-appropriate learning and stronger foundational outcomes. Language, curriculum and assessment were reformed — mother-tongue instruction in early grades, a competency-based curriculum over rote learning and large scale assessments like PARAKH that measure understanding, not recall. Teacher training became continuous rather than one-off, anchored by National Professional Standards, DIKSHA and academic support systems like State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) and District Institute of Education and Training (DIET). EdTech and AI, especially Personalised Adaptive Learning (PAL), are now closing learning gaps within the same classroom. Governance shifted from tracking inputs to owning outcomes, with states building real-time data systems to monitor learning. Lastly, a sharper focus on equity ensured that income, gender, disability, or geography no longer determine a child’s access to learning.
Standing above all of these is foundational literacy and numeracy (FLN). Among the fundamental principles meant to guide the entire system, the NEP 2020 accords the highest priority to every student achieving FLN by Grade 3. It states, “The rest of this Policy will become relevant for our students only if this most basic learning requirement (i.e., reading, writing, and arithmetic at the foundational level) is first achieved.”
The reasoning behind this ordering is worth dwelling on. The ability to read, write and do basic arithmetic is, the policy argued, the prerequisite for all future schooling and lifelong learning. And the NEP was clear-eyed about the scale of the task: government and independent surveys showed India in a genuine learning crisis, with more than five crore children in elementary school unable to read basic text or do simple sums.
Its conclusion was simple – the rest of the policy’s ambitions would matter for these children only once this foundation was in place. This is what gave us the NIPUN Bharat Mission in 2021 – the national mission the policy itself called for, with a clear commitment that every child would master basic reading and arithmetic by the end of Grade 3. Five years on, that commitment is beginning to show results and the data bears it out.
National budget utilisation under the NIPUN Bharat Mission has climbed from 52% in 2021-22 to 80% in 2023-24, with 28 states and union territories now spending more than half their allocated funds – money sanctioned is, increasingly, money spent on the ground. That financial commitment is translating into classroom-level change: 75% of schools now have at least one teacher trained in foundational literacy and numeracy and 73% have received the learning materials needed to put that training into practice. The recently released national assessment results confirm the trend.
None of this would have been possible without the direction and resources the Government of India has put behind FLN. But, it is state governments that have carried much of this forward on the ground, often with real ingenuity, adapting what works to their own contexts, capacities and children. That ingenuity has crystallised into six enablers in particular, recurring across states wherever learning outcomes have genuinely improved.
- The first enabler is mission salience and target setting – together, they give the system both the will to prioritise FLN and a clear sense of where it actually stands. India’s experience with other mission-mode programmes, Swachh Bharat among them, shows that real change needs both visible attention from the top and working structures at the district and block level. Uttar Pradesh (UP) built this into how it governs: regular reviews now reach the Chief Minister’s office and the top of the state’s bureaucracy, with FLN folded into the broader vision the state has set for itself, alongside early childhood education, EdTech and the long-term Viksit UP 2047 agenda, rather than sitting apart as a standalone scheme.
The target setting was made just as concrete. NIPUN Lakshyas define what a child is expected to know at each grade, translating FLN from a broad national goal into specific, measurable competencies. These targets are then tracked down to the level of the individual child: a NIPUN Tallika maps every student in Grades 1-8 against a defined set of competency indicators, or Soochis, giving teachers and mentors a granular, real-time picture of exactly which competencies a child has mastered and which still need work. What could easily have stayed a top-down target on a state dashboard was instead built all the way down to the classroom register, turning “every child must achieve FLN” into a competency-by-competency checklist that a teacher can act on every month.
The result has been a shift from a scheme to an institutionalised reform, with structured review across every level of the system — state, district, block and school — each using real-time data to drive decisions that move the system toward its targets. That discipline has earned Uttar Pradesh a formal endorsement of NIPUN at the Chief Secretaries’ Conference, making it one of the strongest voices nationally pushing for the mission to be extended. States like Assam, Haryana, Telangana and Odisha carry their own versions of this lesson, showing that it is this basic combination of clear attention from the top and disciplined use of data that travels across contexts.
- The second enabler is reliable learning material – both what children learn from and what teachers teach with. Good learning material is what turns an abstract idea into something a child can see, touch and grasp: it shifts a classroom transaction from passive listening to active doing,and lets a teacher reach faster and slower learners in the same room, but only if it actually reaches them in time.
Assam built its turnaround on a three-pronged strategy: First, it built an outcome-linked material ecosystem: 146 materials, each mapped to a specific FLN learning outcome, developed across eight languages – a deliberate choice in a state with no single dominant mother tongue, where the NEP’s push for mother-tongue instruction would otherwise have stayed out of reach for entire communities. Second, it fixed a broken supply chain, moving from reactive, last-minute ordering to early procurement with built-in accountability for delay. Third, it anchored teacher ownership. A Learning Outcome-based Visual Guide equipped teachers to craft their own low-cost, localised materials, with standout innovations celebrated at TLM Melas. A simple written assurance from each teacher then closed the last gap – confirming that a book which had arrived at school had actually reached a child’s hands.
The results have been stark: what was once a seven-month delay in getting books to classrooms is now an 82% early-delivery rate this academic year, reaching 38,000 schools across all 35 districts. Every Grade 1-2 child now holds an individual kit instead of sharing a single, dog-eared textbook.
- The third enabler is effective teacher training and capacity building — the kind that outlives a single annual workshop. Research worldwide points to the same lever: teacher quality moves early-grade learning more than almost anything else, but only with support that is frequent and hands-on, not occasional and theoretical.
Odisha has exemplified this approach by turning a routine fixture into genuine professional learning. It redesigned its Monthly Cluster Meetings — the regular cluster-level gatherings of nearby schools’ teachers — from compliance forums into short, focused sessions, each anchored to a single theme set by the state’s academic body. The flow is hands-on by design. Each session opens with the month’s lesson plans, including plans for multigrade classrooms where one teacher handles several grades at once. Teachers then watch a live demonstration before rehearsing it themselves and practising in pairs. From there, the group reviews student learning data together and each session closes with data-informed planning and explicit commitments to what teachers will try in their own classrooms. Follow-up is built into weekly staff meetings at each school, so the learning doesn’t end when the session does.
The shift has paid off: Grade 1 literacy rose from 39% to 48% in four months and the share of children able to read a full paragraph more than doubled statewide. Nearly all teachers surveyed say they now apply what they practise in these sessions.
- The fourth enabler is structured mentoring — training alone rarely leads to sustained change in classroom practices. Ongoing mentoring is critical for practice adoption by teachers. Madhya Pradesh has strengthened this through SHIKSHA MP, a real-time tech-enabled mentoring system that combines regular school visits, cluster-level academic discussions, classroom observations, teacher coaching and simple spot assessments. Mentors use the platform to track classroom practices, student learning and teacher support needs, enabling timely feedback and targeted support. What began as a pilot in 2023 has now expanded to nearly 7,000 mentors supporting around 85,000 primary schools, making mentoring a routine part of school improvement at scale.
- The fifth enabler sits even earlier in the chain: a stronger pre-primary foundation, the years before Grade 1 that NEP 2020 and NITI Aayog both flag as the highest-return investment in the entire FLN pipeline. Punjab didn’t just tweak the pre-primary years; it rebuilt them. Classrooms that had long doubled as little more than care spaces are now anchored in a play-based model for the Balvatika — the structured preschool stage before Grade 1 — built around the latest national curriculum framework for early childhood learning, complete with innovative learning kits that turn lessons into hands-on play. Nearly 29,000 teachers were trained in two stages rather than the usual four or five — a core group of master trainers first, who then carried the training to every district and block — so the content reached classrooms without being diluted, simplified, or misread along the way. Meanwhile, community learning fairs and quarterly Mother Workshops pulled parents into the process instead of leaving them at the school gate.
The scale is striking: implemented across all 23 districts, the initiative reached roughly 3.5 lakh pre-primary children. The result is a quiet but fundamental shift — Punjab’s Balvatika initiative has moved early learning from a peripheral activity to a structured, system-supported academic priority.
- The sixth and final enabler is regular, honest monitoring and review, with assessments forming a critical part of the review process, strengthening and sustaining each of the other five — turning isolated progress into a system that catches its own gaps and fixes them. Haryana combines two complementary approaches: monthly spot assessments embedded into routine school visits and independent annual evaluations. Both of these systems have been integral to gauging learning outcomes through verifiable data, enabling accurate measurement of the mission’s progress across the state. Every month, mentors and monitors conduct quick oral assessments with randomly selected students during their school visits, generating a real-time picture of learning outcomes and reaching over one lakh children statewide. These findings are reviewed at block and district levels to identify gaps and course-correct. Alongside this, an annual third-party assessment provides an independent check on progress. Continuous validation, surprise checks and quality assurance measures help maintain the integrity of the process and sustain improvement. They have helped Haryana track progress credibly over time, with recent assessments indicating that roughly 70-75% of students are meeting grade-level learning expectations.
Six enablers, one instinct, playing out in state after state: get the basics right in the classroom and build coherent systems to know whether you’ve actually done it. The direction NEP 2020 set six years ago is now visible on the ground, translated by NIPUN Bharat into a working playbook – one built not from theory, but from India’s own states. Sustained, scaled and intensified, these practices are how a child who can read and count by Grade 3 becomes part of a generation able to learn everything that follows – and how that generation, in turn, carries India to Viksit Bharat by 2047. The developed India we mean to become will be built, first, by children learning to read.
