DEVI Sansthan: ALfA Initiative Can Fast-Track India's Literacy Goals

As India strives to achieve universal foundational literacy and numeracy, DEVI Sansthan has released a report, “Making India Literate in Weeks,” on the occasion of the nation’s 78 Independence Day. The report highlights the ALfA (Accelerating Learning for All) initiative, which can help India achieve NIPUN goals before its deadline.
NIPUN, the National Initiative for Proficiency in Reading with Understanding and Numeracy, was launched by the Union Ministry of Education on July 5, 2021. The aim is to ensure that every child in the country attains foundational literacy and numeracy skills, by 2026-27.

The ALfA programme is being successively rolled out in 15,000 schools. Some 1,50,000 students have participated in research implementations, demonstrating remarkable learning gains. Third-party measurement of test scores in various districts improved, on average, from 32 per cent to 59 per cent in just 45 days. The impressive results in Shamli district have featured in a chapter of a book edited by Fernando Reimers and team from Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Beyond individual studies showing examples of success, the macro-picture data also tells a powerful story. The government’s own NIPUN Assessment Test in UP found disproportionately high scores in blocks and districts implementing ALfA. For instance, one of UP’s largest districts, Unnao, had just 15 per cent of schools pass the NIPUN benchmark. Yet, one of its blocks, Hilauli, scored more than triple the district average, with 47 per cent of schools in NIPUN. Hilauli adopted ALfA for all its 155 (100 per cent) schools, just two months before the test. Meanwhile Shamli, a formerly low-performing district, reached a rank of 18 out of UP’s 75 districts. ALfA had been implemented in 210 (41 per cent) schools of Shamli.

These strong improvements are a breath of fresh air amidst a gloomy national picture, with successive Annual Status of Education Reports showing that reading and numeracy performance has stagnated and even declined from 2012 to 2022. Despite renewed government efforts since the Covid crisis, we have not yet recovered to pre-pandemic learning levels, when less than half the children of Grade 5 were able to read a Grade 2 text with understanding.

Speed is critical. The conventional education system takes three years or more to make a child literate, which ALfA achieves in under three months. We do not have time to tinker around with old pedagogies that have not produced major progress. Achieving NIPUN goals will require a mission-minded approach from the government, embracing the new pedagogy, not just tightening the bolts.

In just two years since ALfA’s launch, DEVI Sansthan has signed MoUs with several state & UT governments, including Uttar Pradesh, Ladakh and Himachal Pradesh, the latter signing up for state-wide implementation. DEVI is also partnering with Governments and NGOs for women & adult literacy programmes in Mizoram, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand and West Bengal.

Rajnath Singh, Defence Minister of India, recently expressed his hopes that the ALfA programme would expand dramatically throughout the country. MK Sundaram, Principal Secretary of Education, Uttar Pradesh, while attending a July training of teachers from 580 schools of Lucknow district, expressed his intention to scale ALfA to at least 1,00,000 schools of UP.

The excitement is spreading beyond UP, too. A delegation of 54 officials from Madhya Pradesh visited Lucknow to witness the ALfA pedagogy in action. They left determined to try it out in their state. Earlier, a 130-member delegation from the Ministry of Education, Maldives, came to study the ALfA model. They have since completed a UNICEF-supported research project, producing exciting results. ALfA is spreading in other nations too, including Kenya, Peru and the USA.

The new report concludes that India can become literate within weeks; it need not take years and decades.