India's Children Are in School but Not Learning: The NEP's Unfinished Foundational Task

For most of the first decade of this century, Indian education policy was preoccupied with a single, largely solved problem: getting children into school. The Right to Education Act of 2009 and the enrolment drives that preceded and followed it succeeded in bringing India close to universal primary enrolment, a genuine and underappreciated achievement given the scale of the country and the historical exclusion of girls, Dalit and Adivasi children, and children with disabilities from formal schooling. But the annual household surveys conducted by the non-profit Pratham under its Annual Status of Education Report, running since 2005, have documented with uncomfortable consistency a second and more stubborn problem that enrolment numbers conceal entirely: a very large share of children who are in school are not learning what their grade level implies they should.

The 2022 ASER survey, the first full rural survey after pandemic-related disruptions, found that roughly four in ten children in Standard V could not read a Standard II level text, a proportion that had worsened during the pandemic years but was already troublingly high before it. Arithmetic outcomes told a similar story, with a substantial share of Standard VIII students unable to perform basic division. These are not marginal statistical footnotes; they describe a school system that is, for a very large number of children, failing at its most basic function even while succeeding at the logistical task of keeping them enrolled.

What the National Education Policy got right

To its credit, the National Education Policy of 2020 named this problem in unusually direct language, describing the achievement of foundational literacy and numeracy for all children by grade three as a national mission of the highest priority, on the explicit grounds that a child who cannot read fluently or perform basic arithmetic by that age will struggle to meaningfully engage with the rest of the curriculum, compounding disadvantage year after year. This diagnosis reflects a body of educational research, both Indian and international, showing that foundational skills are a gateway competency: children who fall behind in early literacy rarely catch up without targeted intervention, and the gap widens rather than narrows as they progress through school.

The policy's follow-through, the NIPUN Bharat mission launched in 2021 with a target of universal foundational literacy and numeracy by 2026-27, set out a reasonably coherent framework: goals and outcomes defined by grade and age, teacher training aligned to these outcomes, and periodic assessment to track progress. On paper, this is a considerably more focused approach than earlier education policy documents, which tended toward broad aspirational language without specifying the measurable competencies children were meant to acquire.

The gap between mission design and classroom delivery

Translating this design into classroom practice, however, runs into the same structural weaknesses that have limited Indian education reform for decades. Teacher training programmes under NIPUN Bharat have been rolled out unevenly across states, with some, such as Delhi and a handful of others, investing seriously in structured pedagogy and mentoring while others have treated the mission as another compliance exercise layered atop existing responsibilities. India's chronic shortage of qualified teachers in government schools, combined with high pupil-teacher ratios in many states and the frequent diversion of teachers to non-teaching duties such as election and census work, means that even well-designed foundational literacy curricula often do not reach children in the form intended.

Assessment, the third leg of the NIPUN Bharat framework, has also proven difficult to institutionalise credibly. State-level assessments are sometimes conducted with an eye toward showing improvement rather than diagnosing weakness accurately, an incentive problem common to school systems worldwide but particularly acute where assessment results feed into political narratives about a state government's education record. Without honest, granular data on which children and which schools are falling behind, targeted remediation, the interventions that research shows can meaningfully close foundational learning gaps within a year or two, cannot be deployed where it is most needed.

Language, curriculum and an unresolved debate

The National Education Policy's emphasis on mother-tongue or regional-language instruction in early grades, grounded in substantial international evidence that children learn foundational literacy more effectively in a language they speak at home, has also proven harder to implement than to announce, particularly in linguistically diverse states and in urban areas where parental demand for English-medium instruction, driven by its perceived economic value, runs directly counter to the pedagogical case for mother-tongue instruction. This is a genuine tension rather than a simple implementation failure, and states have resolved it differently, some prioritising parental demand for English out of political necessity, others attempting hybrid models whose effectiveness remains under-studied.

It would be unfair to suggest that no progress has occurred. Certain state governments, Delhi's investment in curriculum reform and teacher mentoring being a frequently cited example, and more recent efforts in states such as Uttar Pradesh under the NIPUN Bharat banner, have shown measurable improvement in specific districts where implementation has been taken seriously, suggesting the underlying policy framework is workable when backed by sustained administrative attention rather than treated as a one-time circular from the education department.

Time is not a neutral factor

The deeper concern is that foundational literacy is a problem with a narrowing window. Children who are currently in grades four, five and six without having consolidated basic reading and arithmetic skills are aging out of the period when remediation is easiest and least costly, and will carry these gaps into secondary school, where the curriculum assumes a competency base many of them do not have. The pandemic-driven school closures, among the longest in the world by some comparative accounts, worsened this problem for an entire cohort of children whose foundational years overlapped with prolonged disruption, and the education system has not yet mounted a remediation effort proportionate to that specific, dated cohort's need.

Four years after the National Education Policy's release and roughly halfway to the NIPUN Bharat mission's own 2026-27 deadline, the honest assessment is that India has diagnosed its learning crisis correctly and built a reasonably sound policy architecture to address it, but has not yet matched that architecture with the administrative intensity, the trained teachers, the honest assessment data and the political patience required to see it through. Enrolment was the easier battle, fought and largely won over two decades. Learning is the harder one, and it is being fought now, unevenly, in classrooms that the policy documents in Delhi cannot see from where they are written.