The ASER 2024 report marks a significant and promising milestone in India’s Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN) journey. We have seen a substantial improvement in learning outcomes for the first time in the 20 years that ASER has been collecting data on learning. This progress signals a recovery from the learning losses caused by pandemic-induced school closures and surpasses pre-pandemic learning levels. This is, in large part, owed to the national prioritisation of FLN, driven by the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020’s strong emphasis on foundational skills and the subsequent launch of the NIPUN Bharat Mission and associated state-level FLN programmes.

The EdTech opportunity

While these are promising shoots of progress, there is a long way to go towards ensuring all children in India develop the foundational skills necessary for lifelong learning and success. Despite an enrolment rate (elementary grades) of 98.1% in India (as per ASER 2024), over 51.2% of children cannot read or understand a simple text at age 10, a phenomenon the World Bank terms ‘learning poverty.’ While various initiatives support NIPUN in classrooms, EdTech offers a transformative opportunity to enhance and extend learning beyond the classroom into the home.

Strong tailwinds support this integration as there is emerging evidence of impact in India and globally – for example, an evaluation of the game-based app Chimple showed improvements in learning equivalent to an additional year of schooling. However, India continues to struggle with a weak supply of quality EdTech for low-income learners, sparse evidence of effectiveness, and inconsistent government and retail adoption. The majority of EdTech solutions are designed to cater to the high-income segments, excluding children from low-income communities. There is, hence, a crucial need to democratise access to quality EdTech to ensure it does not exacerbate existing inequalities.

There are few sources of truth for information on technology for the purpose of learning, especially for the low-income segment. Existing EdTech surveys focus on market fit of for-profit EdTechs targeting the urban population of middle and high-income households, leaving out the voice of the end user in Bharat. To effectively design and disseminate pedagogically sound and contextually relevant EdTech solutions for low-income learners in India, it is crucial to keep in mind the context of the end user.

BaSE: Bringing Bharat’s voice into the EdTech conversation

To fill this crucial information gap and to provide actionable group-up data, Central Square Foundation (CSF) launched the Bharat Survey for EdTech (BaSE), a first-of-its-kind biennial household-level survey on EdTech sentiment and usage. The objective of BaSE is to provide comprehensive data on the needs, challenges, aspirations, sentiments and behaviours of Bharat on EdTech adoption and usage.

The first round of the BaSE survey was released in 2022, covering 6,000+ households and 10,000+ children from across six states in India. The survey findings not only provided interesting insights into EdTech sentiment and usage but also debunked common EdTech myths. 

Both, the availability of devices at a household level and positive parental sentiment towards using technology for learning revealed in the first edition of BaSE, highlight the opportunity to leverage technology to improve learning outcomes at scale, especially for children who lack access to quality education and learning support at home.

BaSE 2.0: Unlocking fresh insights for the future of EdTech and AI

In the past two years, technology has undergone a significant evolution, and it is no different for EdTech. Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) has not only enabled unprecedented capabilities but has also, for the first time, made artificial intelligence extremely accessible, given its ability to interact with the user in natural language. This has brought about changes in both the supply and the demand side. On the supply side, there are a host of EdTech use cases that have emerged as a result of integration with generative AI’s generational and analytical capabilities. The EdTech Insiders generative AI map shows a spectrum of more than 40 EdTech use cases leveraging Gen AI capabilities. On the demand side, early pilots of Gen AI integrated EdTech in states such as Karnataka, Odisha, and Rajasthan reveal the government’s willingness to experiment with frontier technologies.  

With the second iteration of the Bharat Survey for EdTech (BaSE 2.0) planned for release later this year, we aim to understand how device access and EdTech usage have changed over the past three years, as well as test some of our hypotheses related to the prevalence and use of generative AI in Bharat. BaSE 2.0 will collect insights on device access and EdTech and AI usage not only from parents and children but also from teachers, thereby providing household-level and school-level learnings. We are keen to understand how aware students, parents and teachers are about generative AI and how they interact with it, especially for the purpose of learning. We also want to learn how the usage of technology for education varies with different factors that play at the household level (such as gender, income and parental background) as well at the school level (such as the type of school, teacher training and educator motivation).

BaSE 2.0 will supplement quantitative data collection with qualitative enquiry to provide richer and more nuanced insights. The findings, as well as the data, will be made public for the benefit of the ecosystem. With this, we wish to bring to the forefront the context, sentiment and habits of the segments of society most often excluded from digital debates, including those on AI. We hope these insights will provide policymakers, product companies, philanthropists, and funders with accurate and relevant information to effectively design EdTech programs, for learning both in-school and at-home, that drive positive learning outcomes for a Viksit Bharat.

We want to hear from you!

We have compiled our proposed areas of enquiry for BaSE 2.0 and are inviting input and suggestions. We welcome any suggestions on areas that you believe should be included but are not currently covered, and how it may be useful to the work you do.

Tell us using this form.