Enter the NIPUN Bharat Mission (India’s mission for FLN), a bold and transformative response to this challenge. 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. Without this, the rest of the policy will be largely irrelevant.”

At the heart of the mission lies the understanding that literacy and numeracy are not mere academic skills—they are the building blocks for future learning. According to the World Bank, “reading proficiency can serve as a proxy for foundational learning in other subjects, in the same way that the absence of child stunting is a marker of healthy early childhood development.” Therefore, before a child can master complex subjects like science, history, or even the arts, they must first be able to read, write, and solve basic problems.

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. It is for the first time that a structured approach to pedagogy is adopted, providing teachers with clear guidelines on what to teach, how to teach, and how to assess students’ understanding. The NIPUN Bharat Mission is shifting education from rote-memorisation to a more dynamic and engaging learning experience, with curiosity at its core.

Imagine an education system where children are not just learning from their textbook but also from their surroundings and traditions. Where they are allowed to experiment, tinker and question instead of just repeating what their teacher is narrating. Such exploration, questioning, and hands-on experimentation helps children develop a natural love for learning that extends far beyond the classroom. 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. Remarkably, these gains come despite the substantial learning loss caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. For instance, the percentage of Grade 3 students who could read Grade 2 text in government schools increased from 17% in 2014 to 23% in 2024. Similarly, the percentage of grade 3 students who could do simple subtraction increased from 17% to 27.6%. Moreover, government school outcomes improved by 180% from 2022 to 2024 for students who were in grade 3 in 2022 and progressed to grade 5 in 2024. Government schools have higher improvement compared to overall improvement. A notable success story of learning loss recovery is Uttar Pradesh with 60 districts improving by at least five percentage points in 2024 in the proportion of students between the ages of eight-10 years who can read a Std II text, compared to 2018.

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. Undertaking pedagogy and assessment related lecture-demonstrations by experts in classrooms, capacity building of educational administrators, introduction of systematic teacher’s handbooks, cultural contextualisation of every aspect of teaching and learning, close monitoring and individualised feedback for improvement, in addition to the existing key enablers, will go a long way in accomplishing in a decade what some countries have taken about 15 years to achieve in foundational education.

With the mission’s current timeline of five years set to conclude in 2026-27, it is critical to build upon its momentum through NIPUN Bharat 2.0—a five-year extension running at least until 2032. This extension is essential to ensure that the gains made so far are owned and consolidated across the nation. Moreover, the success of NIPUN Bharat 2.0 hinges on more than just policy—it requires the active involvement of state and UT governments, educators, parents, and communities. Only with this unified approach can India ensure that no child is left behind. By extending the mission, India has the opportunity to cement its place as a global exemplar in education, demonstrating that sustainable development is built on an unwavering commitment to equitable and quality education for all.

This article is authored by Shaveta Sharma-Kukreja, CEO & MD, Central Square Foundation and Anita Karwal, chairperson, Gujarat RERA and former secretary, department of school education & literacy, Government of India.