By
Satyaki Paul
On July 5, 2021 the Ministry of Education (MoE) has introduced a new mission National Initiative for Proficiency in Reading with Understanding and Numeracy (NIPUN BHARAT) to ensure that every Class 3 student has foundational literacy and numeracy withing five years. In this context, such policies are in consonance with New Educational Policy but the policy drafted a deadline of 2025, whereas the mission sets a deadline of 2026-27. The MoE has cited COVID19 as the reason for postponement of deadline for such mission.
The features of this mission are:
1. The vision of NIPUN BHARAT is to create an enabling environment to ensure universal acquisition of foundational literacy, so that every child achieves the desired learning competencies in reading, writing and numeracy by the end of Class 3. The deadline is set at 2026-27.
2. NIPUN BHARAT will be implemented through Department of School Education and Literacy (DoSEL). And, it consists of a 5-tier mechanism that will be available at National—State—District—Block—School level in all States/UTs of India, under the umbrella of centrally sponsored scheme (CSS) of “Samagra Shiksha Abhiyaan”(SSA).
3. NIPUN BHARAT is likely to emphasize on setting goals and accountability standards for state governments. Further, guidelines will be provided for teacher training, assessment and creation of printed resources.
4. This initiative will be funded through “Samagra Shiksha Abhiyaan” (SSA) as mentioned earlier. And, no additional funding is allocated under this initiative.
5. SSA has been modified wherein a provision has been added for “foundational literacy and numeracy” (FLP).
6. This mission will also look into stagewise learning goals to ensure that students are acquiring the necessary building blocks to complete their basic studies.
However, for the fiscal year of 2021-22, the budget estimate for “Samagra Shiksha Abhiyaan” (SSA) was Rs. 31,050 crores, a 20% drop from the previous year’s estimate of Rs. 38,750 crores, even though the revised estimate for 2020-21 was just Rs. 27,957 crores, with poor utilization due to COVID19 disruptions. Nonetheless, the Union government needs to increase its spending in the education sector. Further, such decline is also not in consonance with the New Educational Policy, wherein the New Educational Policy suggested to increase the spending to 6% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) which is not the current case.
The author works as a Ph.D. Research Scholar at the Department of Anthropology, University of Calcutta, and the co-author of the book Anthropology For All (2021).