Sixty years ago, UNESCO declared the first International Literacy Day. This September 8th marks the anniversary of this historic announcement. India’s five-year-old NIPUN (National Initiative for Proficiency in Reading with Understanding and Numeracy) Bharat mission reinforced UNESCO’s resolve: it pulled foundational literacy to the centre of national education policy with measurable, time-bound goals backed by committed financial resources.

The gains in learning from NIPUN are visible. PARAKH 2024 survey recorded a 64% national language score, up from 62% in 2021. ASER 2024 recorded that 23.4% of Grade 3 children in government schools were reading at a Grade 2 level, up from 16.3% in 2022. This needs to be celebrated.

However, we are left with three unresolved questions. First: what do we really mean when we say a child has attained foundational literacy? Second: should attention to foundational literacy end at Grade 2? Third: how do we embed foundational literacy into the system permanently?

Authentic literacy is not just about decoding words or reading a paragraph. It is about much more. A child who reads words but cannot follow a textbook argument, parse a notice, or reason through an unfamiliar problem is simply not literate. Literacy requires weighing competing claims, sitting with uncertainty, and exercising genuine agency. It requires judging uneven information and acting on your own judgment.

Being literate is a lifelong journey that begins in Grade 2. Mastery in Grade 2 is a foundation, not the finish line. Any child who misses Grade 2 skills finds the entire learning path derailed. As we progress from Grade 2, the skills and demands keep compounding. Yet in Grades 3, 4, and 5, the system’s attention fades precisely when learner demands accelerate. Beyond the Grade 2 foundation, the support must continue through Grade 5. Given this reality, a NIPUN 2.0 that extends early success into Grades 3–5 is not optional.

The shift from Grades 3 to 5 is qualitative and incremental. Texts grow denser and more varied. They reflect the social and scientific realities children will need to navigate. Reading the word gives way to reading the world. A child through Grades 3-5 must manage paragraphs thick with unfamiliar concepts, track non-linear arguments, hold competing perspectives at once, and extract meaning from texts that assume knowledge she may not have.

As a consequence, the curriculum must account for deeper skill progression: rich background knowledge to anchor new information, command of vocabulary well beyond recognition, the ability to handle syntactic complexity and genre variation, and the habit of interrogating texts rather than receiving them.

PARAKH data show that 35–40% of Grade 3 children are still reading at a Grade 2 level, with starker gaps in rural districts; ASER 2024 corroborates this, reporting 23.6%.

A dual-track system is necessary for these children: catch-up through protected daily time blocks, small-group teaching at each child’s level, and weekly progress tracking are critical. Grade 3 needs to become the bridge year, paced to narrow the learning spread by Grade 4. Without this reset, the problem compounds into higher grades, leaving teachers to inherit classrooms where 40% cannot access grade-level text. Sustained Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN) focus in Grades 3-5 is therefore a necessity for our students.

U.S. economist Eric Hanushek found that three consecutive years with a highly effective teacher can completely close the reading achievement gap for disadvantaged students. This means that the success of a national literacy program hinges on teacher quality.

Therefore, institutions like the State Councils of Educational Research and Training (SCERT) and District Institutes of Education and Training (DIET) need to invest more in early-learning teacher support. Central to this support is the provision of teacher guides — which help teachers improve their functioning, enhance lesson planning, make learning activity-based, and optimise learning outcomes.

Aids for classroom interactions

In India, a whole array of such teacher guides and solutions has been developed to aid classroom interactions. In Bihar, teacher learning material (TLM) kits for foundational literacy and numeracy have been rolled out across all government schools for Classes 1 and 2. They are subject-aligned and provide competency-based teaching aids for Hindi and Mathematics. They also include integration of manipulatives, games, visual demonstrations, and hands-on materials for classroom usage.

Haryana provides another example of the use of teacher guides. They introduced the Shikshan Adhigam Upkaran Sangrah (SAUS), which is a set of Maths and foundational learning TLM kits for Grades 1–3. These are designed to build number sense, understanding of addition and subtraction, shapes, patterns, and logical thinking through hands-on activities rather than rote learning. This enables students to learn faster and better in the long run. Continuing and scaling such solutions will be necessary to both improve learning outcomes and provide assistance to those falling behind.

Further, teacher training is an essential pillar for literacy and numeracy. There is a need to move from generic training to skill-focused practice. Continuous professional development and skilling opportunities that leverage technology must also be provided to teachers throughout their careers. Trained coaches and mentors who can observe practice in real classrooms and provide accurate feedback are also needed as an additional support lever for teachers.

Without a sustained investment in preservice and in-service teacher training and mission-mode implementation, improvement will be marginal. Given the felt need for high-quality education technology both for teaching and for learning, as well as AI literacy, it is imperative that we equip teachers and parents to be partners in their ward’s learning journey.

These measures will not only create a better pathway for student learning and skilling but also ensure that teachers are supported throughout their career cycle. These measures will also ensure that the importance of foundational literacy and numeracy is not limited to a single campaign or mission, but remains embedded as an institutional priority.

Shifting from government-only responsibility

For too long, foundational literacy has been framed as a government-only responsibility. That framing is empirically wrong and strategically insufficient. A whole-of-society approach is needed to ensure that NIPUN 2.0 gets the priority it deserves. Policymakers must extend NIPUN’s measurable, time-bound targets through Grade 5, with assessment frameworks that test comprehension and application, not just fluency. We need to focus on the harder, less visible work of the Grade 3–5 transition, with the same urgency and scale brought to early-grade FLN in 2021.

The workforce, the citizens, and the decision-makers of 2040 are not a future concern. They are sitting in classrooms this year, already shaping the future. It is up to us to ensure that they are literate for the tomorrow they deserve.

(Poornima Garg is the country director of Room to Read India, and Ishmeet Singh is the CEO of Central Square Foundation. Views are personal)