Reading by Class 3: What ASER 2024 Tells Us

Every couple of years, the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) sends volunteers into villages across India to sit with children one at a time and ask them to read a short passage and solve a few sums. It is a simple test. That is its strength. It tells us, without much room for argument, whether children can do the basics.

The ASER 2024 report, released in January 2025, carried some of the most encouraging numbers in years. It is worth reading them carefully, both for what they show and for what they leave out.

The good news in the ASER report 2024

In rural India, 23.4 per cent of children in Class 3 could read a Class 2 level text in 2024. That is up from 16.3 per cent in 2022, and higher than the 20.9 per cent recorded before the pandemic in 2018.

Arithmetic moved in the same direction. The share of Class 3 children who could do a simple subtraction rose to 33.7 per cent, from 25.9 per cent in 2022. Among Class 5 children, 30.7 per cent could solve a division problem, up from 25.6 per cent.

Much of the improvement came from government schools. That matters, because government schools teach most children from poorer and rural families. It suggests that the national push on foundational literacy and numeracy, under the NIPUN Bharat mission launched in 2021, has started to show results in classrooms.

The harder truth

Turn the main number around. If 23.4 per cent of Class 3 children can read a Class 2 text, then roughly three out of four cannot. Two out of three cannot do a basic subtraction.

NIPUN Bharat set a goal that every child should achieve foundational literacy and numeracy by the end of Class 3 by 2026-27. We are now in that final year. On current trends, the goal will not be met in rural India, and certainly not evenly across states and districts.

The children who are left behind in Class 3 do not catch up on their own. A child who cannot read by Class 3 struggles with every subject after that, because every subject now assumes reading. The gap widens each year.

What the numbers do not show

Three blind spots are worth naming.

1. Children with disabilities

Large learning surveys like ASER do not report results separately for children with disabilities. We know very little, at scale, about whether a child with a hearing impairment, a learning disability or an intellectual disability in a rural government school is learning to read. Specific learning disabilities such as dyslexia often go unidentified altogether, so a child who struggles is simply seen as "weak".

2. The district picture

National and state averages hide wide differences. Two districts in the same state can be years apart in learning levels. Policy is planned and delivered at the district level, so that is where the data needs to be read.

3. Why some schools improve

The survey tells us what children can do. It does not tell us why one school improved and another did not. Answering that question needs closer work: classroom observation, teacher interviews, and conversations with parents and education officials.

What this means for Rajasthan

Rajasthan has large rural and tribal areas, long distances between villages and schools, and many children who are the first in their family to go to school. Each of these makes foundational learning harder to deliver evenly. The state's district-level ASER findings and its own school assessment data deserve close study, with three questions in mind:

• Which districts and blocks are moving fastest, and what are they doing differently?
• Are children with disabilities being identified, supported and assessed in the same classrooms?
• Do teachers have the training and materials to teach children who are far behind their grade level?

Where Sutra fits

Sutra works on the gap between policy and what reaches children. Foundational learning is a clear example. The policy intent is strong, the funding is in place and the direction is right. The work now is in the detail: in how teachers are supported, how children who fall behind are identified, and how district data is used to make decisions.

We will be looking closely at foundational learning, and the inclusion of children with disabilities within it, as part of our work in Rajasthan. If you are working on this in the state, we would like to talk. Write to us at info@sutraindia.org.