Context: Quality Early Childhood Care and Education is the necessary propellant for the cognitive development of children. Various governmental and non-governmental surveys indicate that a large proportion of elementary students in India are lacking basic foundational literacy and numeracy skills.
Relevance of the Topic: Mains: Foundational Literacy and Numeracy: Concept & Challenges in Achievement.
Education is the most potent tool for socio-economic mobility and a key instrument for building an equitable and just society. India is a party to UN Sustainable Development Goals, whose SDG4 aims to deliver quality education for all.
Foundational Literacy and Numeracy
- Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN) refers to basic skills in reading, writing, and mathematics. It is the ability to read and understand a basic text and perform simple mathematical calculations by the end of grade 3.
- Significance: Strong literacy and numeracy help children to learn, experiment, reason and create, to be active and informed citizens, and to contribute socially, culturally and economically. National Education Policy (2020) accords the highest importance to the achievement of Foundational Literacy and Numeracy.
- India Early Childhood Education (ECE) Impact Study found that:
- Only 15% of pre-primary children could match basic objects, a skill essential for letter recognition in Class one.
- Only 30% could identify larger and smaller numbers, which are foundational for arithmetic.
As a result, children often start formal schooling without the skills they need, with many bypassing essential ECE years entirely.
Challenges in the achievement of Foundational Literacy and Numeracy:
- Lack of Early childcare and education: Over 85% of a child’s cumulative brain development occurs prior to the age of 6. Presently, quality ECCE is not available to crores of young children, particularly children from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds. Only 9% of pre-primary schools have a dedicated ECCE teacher.
- Poor status of Anganwadis: The Anganwadi workers are overworked, with duties and responsibilities that centre around her being a teacher, a nurse and a social service provider. AWW is not equipped with the necessary tools to be able to engage children in learning experiences. AWW spends only 38 minutes per day on preschool instruction, which is far short of the scheduled 2 hours.
- Nutritional deficiencies among children: The relationship between nutrition, health and learning is undeniably strong. As per GHI 2024, India has the highest child-wasting rate (18.7%) of all the countries, with a child stunting rate of 35.5%. This malnutrition adversely affects children’s cognitive development.
- Inadequate budget: National Education Policy of 1968 recommended India should spend 6% of its GDP on education. However, as per the Economic Survey (2024-25), India spends just 2.7% of its GDP on education. The government spends only ₹1,263 a child annually on ECE compared to ₹37,000 a student on school education, largely on producing teaching-learning materials that are often underused.
- Inadequate infrastructure: Though RTE Act (2009) mandated basic infrastructure in schools like toilets, safe drinking water, playground etc., the 2023-24 UDISE+ data shows that infrastructural deficit still persists, particularly in government schools.
- Low pupil-to-teacher ratio: As per the Right to Education Act 2009, the desired Teacher Pupil ratio (TPR) in primary schools is 1:30 in primary and 1:35 in upper primary levels. But, TPR varies in India across different states and regions, indicating uneven distribution of teaching resources. As per the UDISE data, the proportion of single-teacher schools in India is as high as 14.7%.
- Poor pedagogic skills: The medium of instruction is often different from the mother tongue of children. It negatively impacts the child’s motivation to engage in classroom processes.
Way Forward
- Increase budget allocation, with focused investment in Foundational Literacy and Numeracy.
- Provision of Primary education in the Mother tongue.
- Alignment of synergies between the Ministry of Women and Child Development and Ministry of Education.
- Since nutrition and education are both equally important and require significant time and effort, it may be worthwhile to consider having two Anganwadi workers per Anganwadi.
- Ensure minimum instruction time in schools and learning at home. The Right to Education Act (2009) requires that children from grades I-V spend 200 days involving 800 instruction hours in school. Currently, different states are seen allocating different amounts of time for literacy instruction, which ranges from 35 min in some states to about 90 minutes in some others. There needs to be a standard block of time across all the states.
National Education Policy 2020 stipulates that Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN) is critical for education and lifelong learning success. In this direction, the government has launched the NIPUN Bharat Mission (National Initiative for Proficiency in Reading with Understanding and Numeracy) to ensure that every child in the country necessarily attains FLN by the end of Grade 3, by 2026-27.
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