From mission to movement: How community involvement can power NIPUN Bharat

From mission to movement: How community involvement can power NIPUN Bharat Premium

Sunita Yadav, a school dropout, grew up without notebooks for homework and parents who never asked about her studies. Today, her daughter Rishika learns in a transformed environment. The same government school system now provides teaching-learning materials. The teachers train parents to support learning at home, and the village panchayat champions education. When a parent-teacher meeting taught Sunita how to help with homework, she changed her routine. “Whenever I cook food, I make her sit beside me and do homework,” she explains.

In Madhya Pradesh, Bal Choupal sessions have introduced play-based learning to families, and in Bihar, loudspeakers broadcast slogans like “Apan Bihar, NIPUN Bihar,” turning FLN into a community rallying cry. Give this support to five crore children in early grades, and NIPUN Bharat shifts from mission to movement. The way to get there is to start with the community.

India's Swachh Bharat Mission demonstrated the power of people-driven change at an unprecedented scale. As per the Swachh Bharat Mission Urban website, over 20 crore citizens participated in sanitation drives, and more than 6.5 lakh Swachhagrahi volunteers went door-to-door across Indian villages, mapping open defecation sites, building toilets, and monitoring their use. A study published in Nature, a science journal, said that 60,000 - 70,000 infant deaths were averted annually because of the Swachh Bharat Mission. The same level of participation is now needed in education.

Around the world, community mobilisation has repeatedly proven its transformative power. In 1977, Professor Wangari Maathai launched the Green Belt Movement in Kenya to combat environmental degradation and empower women affected by the loss of natural resources. Within a decade, 30,000 women were trained in forestry and related trades, planting over 5.1 crore trees and transforming more than 4,000 communities. Two decades later, the Favela-Bairro Program in Rio de Janeiro leveraged community participation to upgrade 105 informal settlements into integrated neighbourhoods, with improved sanitation, infrastructure, and community spaces, impacting 4.5 lakh people.

Global studies confirm that community participation can transform learning outcomes, too. In Vietnam, World Bank studies found that parental expectations and community engagement explained up to half the variation between the 2012 and 2015 PISA scores. But how can such community involvement be replicated in India? The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 aims to make a “substantial investment in a strong, vibrant public education system as well as the encouragement and facilitation of true philanthropic private and community participation”. The NIPUN Bharat Mission, which was launched in 2021, tries to embody this fundamental principle by encouraging a whole-of-society approach to improving foundational learning.

With an annual budgetary allocation of ₹2,500 crore, the NIPUN Bharat Mission has enabled interventions like well-designed teaching-learning materials (TLMs), teacher training and mentoring, monitoring, and regular student assessments. Four years in, the results are promising. PARAKH Rashtriya Sarvekshan 2024 reports Grade 3 students scoring 64% in language (as compared to 57% in Grade 6 and 54% in Grade 9) and 60% in Mathematics (as compared to 56% in Grade 6 and 37% in Grade 9). ASER 2024 shows that the proportion of Grade 3 children reading Grade 2 text and performing simple subtraction has increased by six and 10 percentage points, respectively, since 2014, despite the COVID-induced learning loss.

However, to truly realise the promise of every child achieving grade-level competencies, the NIPUN Bharat Mission must evolve into a NIPUN Bharat Movement. The government could first invest in awareness and information campaigns for FLN to improve understanding around the importance of foundational learning and its impact not only on future learning but also on increased productivity for each child.

Swachh Bharat Mission did the same by allocating 5-15% of their budgets on awareness campaigns. NIPUN Bharat Mission can also get similar investments. Allocating roughly 10% of the mission's budget (about ₹250 crore) annually for outreach, training, and awareness can empower parents and communities with the right knowledge and tools and could prove to be a catalyst for change.

Panchayati Raj Institutions and Municipal Corporations can be empowered to organise locality-level NIPUN Sabhas, oral reading fluency competitions, street plays, commission wall paintings, and more. The NIPUN Gram Sabha model of Bihar can be replicated. Through the Mukhiyas, parents were educated on the mission's goals and the importance of their involvement. This raised parent attendance in PTMs from 20-30% to 60% and improved student attendance from 58-65% to 70-76% within a year.

The perception of teachers could be changed, and their motivation increased. Effective teachers are shown to boost student achievement by 1.5 grade levels, while weaker ones provide only half a year's growth. However, surveys in India and other developing countries show that teachers believe “there is little they can do to help a student learn” if parents are uneducated.

Moreover, teachers also tend to overestimate high achievers and underestimate struggling students, further widening the skills gap. This perception of the teachers must change for all children to be successful. Dedicated campaigns to help teachers understand why FLN is important, along with regular access to student performance data, can help solve the perception issue.

This can be complemented by institutionalising rewards and recognition programs at a district level. States like Uttar Pradesh and Haryana have established such systems, which have resulted in improvement in teacher motivation.

Parents can be engaged in their child's learning journey. Global research has shown that parental involvement accounts for 61% of the variance in Grade 6 learning outcomes. Moreover, schools with strong parental engagement are ten times more likely to improve learning outcomes and help children achieve four additional months' progress in a year.

Regular PTMs strengthen this bond and create demand for better quality; in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, monthly PTMs have increased parental attendance by 28%. At home, the rise in educated mothers offers a new opportunity for support. The number of mothers with education beyond Grade 5 has increased from 35% in 2010 to nearly 60% in 2022. However, diagnostic studies reveal that parents remain unsure how to contribute to their child's foundational learning. Simple interventions, like at-home workbooks or WhatsApp nudges, make a difference. According to the report, Using Behavioural Insights to Increase Parents' Engagement on FLN (by CSF and Ashoka University), parents who engaged with these nudges were 1.16 times more likely to adopt effective practices and invest in their child's learning.

The creation of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 demonstrated the power of public consultation, which was unprecedented since the framing of the Constitution. This same spirit must now guide NIPUN Bharat Mission. Governments must invest in awareness, communities must engage, teachers must lead, and parents must partner with schools. Only through Janbhagidari can we ensure that every child achieves foundational literacy and numeracy, laying the groundwork for a future-ready India. NIPUN Bharat must move beyond a mission; it must become a movement that is by the people and for the people who are building a Viksit Bharat.

(Shaveta Sharma-Kukreja is the CEO & MD, Central Square Foundation. Jayshree Oza is an Education Expert and Senior Advisor, Central Square Foundation.)

Published - November 28, 2025 08:14 pm IST

education / students / teaching and learning / school

Source: The Hindu
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