Since July 2021, Haryana has been building one of India’s most comprehensive state-level foundational learning ecosystems. What began as a commitment to the NIPUN Bharat Mission has evolved into a multi-layered reform, spanning structured teaching-learning materials, a dedicated mentoring cadre, a suite of digital governance tools, large-scale census assessments, and a remediation loop that has produced measurable learning gains within single academic terms. In this conversation, we speak with Dr. Parmod Kumar, State Programme Officer, Department of School Education, Haryana, to understand how this system was built, what it has taught the state, and what it means for the larger national mission.

Q1. The state launched the NIPUN Haryana Mission in July 2021, just weeks after the national NIPUN Bharat Mission launch. Over four years later, the mission now reaches ~35,000 primary teachers and ~9 lakh students. How do you reflect on that journey, what did you get right early and what took longer to figure out than you expected?

Answer: When we launched in July 2021, the honest truth is that we understood the goal far better than we understood the pathway. The NIPUN Bharat mission gave us a clear north star: universal foundational literacy and numeracy by Grade 3, but converting that into a system that actually changed what happened in a classroom in Nuh or Sirsa on a Monday morning took considerably longer.

What we got right early was the decision to treat this as a whole-system intervention rather than a programme. From the very beginning, we invested simultaneously in teaching-learning material, teacher training, mentoring, monitoring, and assessments, not sequentially. The State Resource Group brought together STAR teachers, SCERT, DIETs, and external partners to co-develop contextualised, competency-based teacher manuals and student workbooks, aligned to a common timetable across all primary schools. That coherence between what teachers were expected to teach, what students were working on, and what was being assessed took time to achieve but proved foundational. What took longer than expected was building the monitoring and accountability infrastructure to the point where it drove actual classroom change rather than just compliance reporting. That required multiple iterations of the mentoring & monitoring protocols, dashboard design, and most importantly, the culture of using data for improvement rather than just for audit.

Q2. The mission rests heavily on teachers through instruction based upon structured teaching-learning materials (TLMs), targeted teacher professional development and a dedicated mentoring cadre. How did you think about teacher capacity and motivation as a system design problem, not just a training problem?

Answer: This is the question that sits at the heart of everything. Training is the easy part, you can design a module, cascade it, track attendance, and declare it done. What is much harder is building a teacher’s genuine belief that the approach works and her confidence to execute it in a mixed-ability classroom of 35 children with varying attendance and home support.

We tried to address this in three ways. First, the TLMs, the teacher manuals, student books, skill passbooks, and weekly lesson plans, were all designed to reduce the cognitive load of planning, so that a teacher could walk in knowing exactly what she was doing that day and why. Second, the mentoring model was built around classroom observation and feedback, not inspection. The ABRC or BRP who visits a school is there to observe a lesson being delivered, assess a few students alongside the teacher, and have a conversation about what is working and what is not. That relationship- when it functions well, is where teacher capacity actually grows. Third, we tried to make goals concrete and visible. When a teacher knows that three specific children in her class need to move from Supported to Recognised level before the next assessment round, and she gets a two-day training specifically about how to do that, the goal is no longer abstract. That specificity of goal plus capacity and review, is what moved things.

Q3. Haryana built a full suite of digital applications alongside its TLMs and teacher support. How did technology strengthen governance and what has it enabled on parental engagement?

Answer: Technology is most useful in this work when it reduces friction and increases visibility, but it cannot substitute for the visit, the conversation, or the teaching relationship.

The NIPUN Haryana Teacher, Mentor, and Monitor Apps did something more specific than digitise existing processes: they made every classroom observation, every assessment, and every school visit structured, standardised, and instantly visible across the system. A mentor observes a classroom on Tuesday morning, the teacher receives structured feedback in real time, and the same data flows to a BEO’s dashboard when she conducts a review meeting on Wednesday afternoon. That compression of the feedback loop changes how reviews are conducted and what decisions get made. The dashboards at state, district, and block level ensure everyone, from the DEEO to the SPIU member, is looking at the same numbers daily to undertake targeted actions towards driving student learning outcomes.

On parental engagement, a child spends far more hours at home than in school, and foundational learning cannot be consolidated without family support. The NIPUN Haryana Parent App, recently integrated with gamified home-based learning modules, is designed to bridge that gap. We are still building the habit of use. What has moved the needle more immediately is the introduction of Holistic Progress Cards during Mega PTMs, shared with parents face-to-face, communicating not marks but specific mastered competencies and next steps. That shift in language from how much to what exactly, changes the conversation between a parent and a teacher in a PTM from a passive handover to an informed dialogue. 

Q4. Between the two census assessment rounds last academic year, Haryana saw striking improvements in learning outcomes. What drove those gains and what did the experience teach you about the relationship between assessment, remediation and governance?

Answer: The honest answer is that the assessment alone drove nothing. Data without action is just documentation. What drove the gains was the full sequence that followed the census: specific teacher-level targets, a dedicated two-day training built directly around what the data had revealed, and personal governance ownership with officials adopting Category C schools and weekly dashboards keeping everyone accountable to the same numbers.

The lesson is not that census assessment works. It is that assessment-informed instruction, coupled with targeted capacity building and regularly reviewed goals, works,  and the census grouping exercise is what made all three specific enough to matter. The number of Category A schools with over 75% students mastering key competencies rose from 7% to 53% in a single term. That movement came from the whole loop, not from any single part of it.

Q5. NIPUN Haryana has received significant national and international recognition. What does it mean for a state-level education mission to reach this kind of visibility and looking ahead, what is the work that still needs to be done to make the gains permanent and to contribute to the larger Viksit Bharat vision?

Answer: The recognition that NIPUN Haryana has received reflects something larger than one state’s achievement. The international delegation visits from over 18 countries and research publications at forums such as UCL, NTU, Glasgow, and George Mason University signal that what Haryana has built is not just a state-level success story- it is proof of concept for what a government system in India can produce. If a state can move Category A schools from 7% to 53% within a single academic term, through its own teachers, its own officials, and its own institutional infrastructure, then the question for every other state is not whether this is possible but whether they are prepared to make the same choices. That is what makes this recognition meaningful, it positions India, through Haryana’s experience, as a genuine exemplar in the global conversation on foundational learning, not a recipient of lessons from elsewhere but a contributor to them.

That said, the recognition also creates a responsibility to be honest about what is still unfinished. The mission has travelled well from the Prime Minister’s vision to the classroom teacher, but it has not yet fully reached the last and most important tier: the parent at home. I often say that the real goal is to go from “PM se MP tak”–  from the Prime Minister’s mandate all the way to Mummy-Papa. Holistic Progress Cards that communicate competencies in plain language to parents, and strengthening at-home learning through the NIPUN Haryana Parent App, are the next frontier, because a child’s foundational learning cannot be consolidated by the school alone. The moment a parent understands not just how much her child scored but what she can and cannot yet do, the mission gains a partner in every home. 

Second, while Haryana has built a strong system through Grade 3, consolidating those gains in Grades 4 and 5 is now essential. NEP 2020 is clear that foundational learning must be reinforced through the preparatory stage, not treated as a Grade 3 finish line, a point echoed at the 5th National Conference of Chief Secretaries.

Third, and most fundamentally, sustaining the culture of data use beyond any particular administrative cycle. What Haryana has built is a system in which the same number that a class teacher acts on is the number a Deputy Commissioner is accountable for. Keeping that alignment intact across elections, transfers, and the natural entropy of any bureaucratic system—is the governance challenge that no app or dashboard solves on its own. Haryana’s experience suggests that sustained learning outcomes are achievable, but only if the system treats every child’s learning level as a governance responsibility that it owns all the way from the classroom to the top, and acts on what it finds with the same urgency it would apply to any other state priority. That sense of urgency, sustained over years rather than terms, is what Viksit Bharat ultimately depends on. NEP 2020 has set a clear waypoint: 100% Gross Enrolment Ratio from pre-school through secondary level by 2030. That goal is unreachable if children leave primary school without foundational skills, a child who cannot read or count by Grade 3 rarely stays long enough to reach secondary. Every child we make NIPUN today is therefore not just a learning gain, it is a child more likely to stay in school, complete her education, and fully participate in the India of 2047. Viksit Bharat will not be built in boardrooms or policy documents. It will be built one foundational skill at a time, in classrooms and in the homes that every Mummy-Papa shares with their child each evening.