Hello Folks!
Hope you are safe and doing well!
Recently, the Ministry of Education has launched NIPUN Bharat Programme. Are you intrigued to know what this programme is all about? If yes, then we have got you covered. In this blog, we will cover all the key points of this scheme. In addition, we will discuss about the implementation and outcomes of this programme.
About the NIPUN Bharat Programme
The Union Government has launched the NIPUN Bharat Programme on 5th July 2021. ‘NIPUN’ stands for the National Initiative for Proficiency in Reading with Understanding and Numeracy. The Programme is an initiative of the Ministry of Education. Key Points of the Programme are:
- The Programme aims to cover the learning needs of children in the age group of 3 to 9 years.
- It marks an important step undertaken by the Department of School Education and Literacy.
- It is among a series of measures taken for implementation of the National Education Policy 2020.
- Target: Every child achieves the desired learning competencies in reading, writing and numeracy by the end of Grade 3, by 2026-27.
- This initiative will be a part of the school education programme, Samagra Shiksha.
- Learning outcomes have been divided into three developmental goals:
- Goal I: Health and well-being
- Goal II: Effective communicators
- Goal III: Involved learners
Focus Areas of the NIPUN Bharat Programme
The focus areas of this scheme are:
- Access and retaining children in foundational years of schooling
- Teacher Capacity Building
- Development of high-quality and diversified Student and Teacher Resources/Learning Materials
- Tracking the progress of each child in achieving learning outcomes.
Objectives of the ‘NIPUN Bharat’
- To ensure an inclusive classroom environment by incorporating play, discovery, and activity-based pedagogies.
- To enable children to become motivated, independent, and engaged readers and writers with comprehension possessing sustainable reading and writing skills.
- To make children understand the reasoning in the domains of number, measurement, and shapes.
- To enable them to become independent in problem-solving by way of numeracy and spatial understanding skills.
- To ensure availability and effective usage of high-quality and culturally responsive teaching-learning material in children’s familiar/mother language(s).
- To focus on continuous capacity building of teachers, head-teachers, academic resource persons and education administrators.
- To actively engage with all stakeholders i.e. Teachers, Parents, Students and Community, policymakers in building an efficient learning process.
- To ensure assessment “as, of and for” learning through portfolios, group and collaborative work, project work, quizzes, presentations, etc.
- To ensure tracking of learning levels of all students.
Implementation of NIPUN Bharat Programme
- NIPUN Bharat will be implemented by the Department of School Education and Literacy.
- A five-tier implementation mechanism will be set up at the National- State- District- Block- School level in all States and UTs. It will run under the aegis of the centrally sponsored scheme of Samagra Shiksha.
- The goals of the Mission are set in the form of Lakshya Soochi or Targets for Foundational Literacy and Numeracy.
- The Lakshyas are based on the learning outcomes developed by the NCERT and international research and ORF studies.
- A special package for foundational literacy and Numeracy under NISHTHA is being developed by NCERT. Around 25 lakh teachers teaching at pre-primary to primary grade will be trained this year on FLN.
Expected Outcomes of the NIPUN Bharat Programme
The following outcomes have been envisaged from the implementation of the goals and objectives of the NIPUN Bharat Mission:
- Foundational skills enable to keep children in class thereby reducing the dropouts and improve transition rate from primary to secondary stages.
- Activity-based learning and a conducive learning environment will improve the quality of education.
- Innovative pedagogies such as toy-based and experiential learning will be used in classroom transactions thereby making learning a joyful activity.
- Intensive capacity building of teachers will make them empowered and provide greater autonomy for choosing the pedagogy.
- Holistic development of the child by focusing on different domains of development like physical and motor development, socio-emotional development, cognitive development, etc. These will be reflected in a Holistic Progress Card.
- Children to achieve a steeper learning trajectory which may have positive impacts on later life outcomes and employment.
- Since almost every child attends early grades, therefore, focus at that stage will also benefit the socio-economic disadvantageous group. Thus, ensuring access to equitable and inclusive quality education.
So these were all the necessary information about the NIPUN Bharat Programme. Before ending the blog, let’s also look at the Samagra Shiksha Abhiyaan under which the programme is launched.
Samagra Shiksha Abhiyaan
- It is an Integrated Scheme for School Education that has been launched in 2018-19 as a Centrally Sponsored Scheme.
- It proposed to treat school education holistically without segmentation from pre-nursery to Class 12.
- It aims to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education at all levels of school education.
- This programme subsumes the three erstwhile Centrally Sponsored Schemes of:
- Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA)
- Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan (RMSA)
- Teacher Education (TE)
- It envisages the ‘school’ as a continuum from pre-school, primary, upper primary, secondary to senior secondary levels.
With this, we come to the end of this blog on ‘NIPUN Bharat Programme’. We hope you find this blog interesting and informative.
