Learning after the pandemic: recovery, not yet repair

The most encouraging education finding of recent years is also the most limited: learning has recovered from the pandemic, but it has not been repaired. The Annual Status of Education Report, ASER 2024, published by Pratham, covered 649,491 children aged three to sixteen across 17,997 villages in 605 rural districts, testing reading and arithmetic at home rather than in school. It found not only a full recovery from pandemic-era learning loss but primary-grade learning levels above their pre-pandemic marks. Standard III reading in government schools reached 23.4 per cent in 2024, the highest since ASER began in 2005, and Standard III subtraction rose to 33.7 per cent nationally from 25.9 per cent in 2022.

The level, however, is the second finding. Fewer than a quarter of Standard III children in government schools can read a Standard II text, and fewer than a third can subtract. By Standard VIII, arithmetic performance had barely moved in six years, from 44.1 per cent in 2018 to 45.8 per cent in 2024. On Standard V reading, the government-private gap narrowed from 20.9 percentage points in 2018 to 14.5 in 2024, because government schools recovered fully to their pre-pandemic level while private schools did not. Enrolment was stable, and the share of rural six-to-fourteen-year-olds in government schools, which rose from 65.6 per cent in 2018 to 72.9 per cent in 2022, fell back to 66.8 per cent in 2024.

On 6 May 2026, NITI Aayog released a policy report on school education that drew on ASER 2024, UDISE+ 2024-25, and the PARAKH Rashtriya Sarvekshan 2024, and reached the same two-sided conclusion: foundational reading and arithmetic had improved after the Covid disruption, linked by the report to the NIPUN Bharat Mission and competency-based reforms under the National Education Policy 2020, but outcomes remained uneven across states and higher grades, with continued dependence on rote learning rather than competency-based learning.

The deadline sharpens the stakes. NIPUN Bharat, launched in July 2021, set a target of universal foundational literacy and numeracy by the end of Grade 3 by 2026-27, the school year now under way. Whether that target is met will be judged not by enrolment, which is already high, but by the next ASER: whether a child in Standard III can read, subtract, and understand what she reads.