Summary

• Child literacy in India is moving beyond basic reading: As foundational literacy improves, the focus must increasingly shift towards whether children understand and can use what they read.
• Reading and comprehension are not the same: A child may be able to read words aloud while still struggling to understand a story, instruction or unfamiliar idea.
• Language shapes learning: India’s multilingual classrooms make it especially important to recognise the role of children’s home languages in developing comprehension and conceptual understanding.
• Teachers and communities matter: Teachers, parents, community organisations and learning spaces can create the conversations, reading opportunities and support systems that help children become independent learners.
• Child literacy is ultimately about agency: The ability to understand written information gives children greater confidence to learn, make decisions, access information and participate in society.

There is a familiar scene in classrooms across India. A teacher asks a child to read a paragraph aloud, and the child begins carefully, sounding out the words, pausing at punctuation and making her way through the passage. To an observer, she appears to be reading. But when the teacher asks the more important question, “What did you understand?”, the child hesitates. She may have successfully decoded every word on the page without being able to explain what the passage actually meant.

That distinction matters more than it might seem.

For a long time, conversations about child literacy have understandably focused on whether children can read. In a country where millions of children have historically struggled to acquire foundational literacy, being able to recognise letters, read words and make sense of simple sentences remains an essential educational milestone. But learning to read is not the final destination. It is the beginning of a much longer journey in which children learn to interpret information, connect ideas, ask questions, distinguish between what they know and what they do not know, and eventually use written information to make decisions for themselves.

This is becoming an increasingly important question for India. The country has made meaningful progress in foundational learning, particularly following the disruption caused by the pandemic. Yet recent learning assessments continue to show that a significant proportion of children who are formally enrolled in school are still not reading at the level expected for their age or grade. The ASER 2024 findings, for instance, showed a substantial improvement in children’s ability to read compared with the pandemic years, but they also demonstrated that many children continue to struggle with texts that should be within their expected learning level.

The next challenge, therefore, is not simply getting children to read more. It is helping them understand what they read.

When reading becomes learning

The difference between reading and understanding can appear deceptively small. A child who reads the sentence, “The farmer could not sow the seeds because there had been no rain,” may be able to pronounce every word correctly. But can she explain why the absence of rain affected the farmer? Can she connect the sentence to what she knows about agriculture? Can she imagine what might happen if the drought continues? Can she read a different account of water scarcity and recognise that it describes a related problem?

These are different levels of child literacy, and they become increasingly important as children progress through school.

A child in the early years may need to learn that letters represent sounds and that words carry meaning. As she grows older, however, she must learn to navigate paragraphs, arguments, instructions, explanations and unfamiliar vocabulary. By the time she reaches secondary school, almost every subject depends upon this ability. Science requires students to understand explanations and interpret information. Mathematics requires them to comprehend word problems. Social science asks them to understand historical accounts, compare perspectives and make connections between events.

When comprehension is weak, therefore, the problem does not remain confined to the language classroom. A child who cannot understand the language of a textbook may find it difficult to learn science even if she is naturally curious about how the world works. A student who struggles to interpret written instructions may appear inattentive when the underlying difficulty is that she has not understood what she has been asked to do.

This is why child literacy needs to be understood not merely as a technical skill but as the foundation upon which further learning is built.

India’s child literacy story is changing

India’s focus on foundational literacy and numeracy through the National Education Policy and initiatives such as NIPUN Bharat reflects an important recognition: children cannot meaningfully participate in later stages of education if they have not acquired basic reading and numeracy skills early in life.

The progress is worth recognising. ASER data over the years have shown that children’s basic reading abilities can improve significantly when learning receives sustained attention and when schools and communities respond to gaps rather than simply moving children from one grade to the next.

But the same evidence also points towards a more difficult problem. Children in the same classroom can be at very different stages of learning. One child may be comfortable reading a short story independently, while another child in the same grade may still struggle with a much simpler passage. If teaching follows the textbook without accounting for these differences, the children who are already behind can find it increasingly difficult to catch up.

This creates a quiet cycle of disadvantage. The curriculum moves forward because the school year must move forward, while the child’s foundational skills remain incomplete. The gap then becomes harder to close with every passing year because the language and complexity of learning continue to increase.

This is why the question of comprehension cannot be separated from the question of foundational learning. Children need to learn to read, but they also need enough time, practice and support to turn reading into understanding.

The language of learning matters

There is another dimension to India’s child literacy challenge that cannot be ignored: language.

India’s classrooms are inherently multilingual. A child may speak one language at home, encounter another in her community and be taught in a third language at school. For some children, particularly those from linguistic minorities and tribal communities, the distance between the language they know best and the language used in formal education can become an additional barrier to comprehension.

This does not necessarily mean that the child lacks ability or curiosity. It may mean that she is being asked to demonstrate what she knows through a language she has not yet mastered.

The UNESCO State of the Education Report for India 2025, which focused on multilingual education, emphasised the importance of recognising India’s linguistic diversity within education systems. The report highlighted the potential of children’s home languages to strengthen participation, comprehension and conceptual learning, particularly among children from underserved communities.

This matters because comprehension depends partly on what a child already knows. When a new idea is presented in a language that feels unfamiliar, the child has to solve two problems simultaneously: understanding the language and understanding the concept. When learning can begin from a language the child already knows, some of that cognitive burden is reduced.

The implication for educators is significant. Rather than asking only whether a child can read a particular text, it is worth asking whether the language of that text allows the child to demonstrate what she understands.

Much of child literacy begins outside school

The foundations of comprehension are not built exclusively through textbooks.

They are built through conversation, storytelling and everyday experiences. A parent explaining why the electricity has gone out, a grandparent recounting a story from their childhood, a child asking where rainwater goes after it disappears into a drain, or siblings arguing about the ending of a television programme are all encounters with language and meaning.

Through these ordinary interactions, children learn to describe events, sequence information, ask questions, make predictions and explain their reasoning. They encounter new vocabulary and learn how ideas connect. These experiences later become resources they draw upon when they encounter written text.

This is particularly important for children who grow up in homes with limited access to books or where adults may themselves have had limited educational opportunities. The absence of books does not mean an absence of intelligence or curiosity, but it can mean fewer opportunities for children to practise the language skills that support reading comprehension.

That is where community-based learning can make a difference.

Libraries, community learning centres, schools, civil-society organisations and local education initiatives can create spaces where children encounter books, stories, conversations and activities beyond the formal classroom. A reading corner, a storytelling session or a child being encouraged to explain a story in her own words may appear modest when compared with the scale of India’s education system. Yet these repeated opportunities are precisely what allow child literacy to become a habit rather than an examination skill.

Teachers need to see beyond the correct answer

Improving comprehension also requires us to reconsider what happens between a teacher and a child when an answer is wrong.

A wrong answer is not necessarily evidence that a child has not learned. Sometimes it is a window into how she is thinking.

A child may misunderstand a word. She may have interpreted a sentence differently. She may understand the underlying concept but lack the vocabulary to explain it. She may understand the passage in her home language but struggle to express that understanding in the language used for instruction.

Each of these situations requires a different response.

This makes the teacher’s role particularly important. Teachers need opportunities to understand where children are in their learning and practical strategies for responding to those differences. Instead of simply asking whether children have completed a chapter, teachers can ask them to explain an idea in their own words, predict what might happen next, connect a story with something they already know or explain why a character made a particular decision.

These conversations can reveal far more about comprehension than a worksheet filled with correct answers.

They also create something that is easily overlooked in discussions about child literacy: confidence. Children who are afraid of giving the wrong answer are less likely to ask questions. Children who understand that uncertainty and mistakes are part of learning are more willing to participate, experiment with ideas and try again.

A strong literacy environment therefore needs to be intellectually demanding without becoming intimidating.

Technology can expand access, but it cannot replace relationships

Technology has an important role to play in this landscape. Digital libraries, educational platforms, translation tools and adaptive learning technologies can potentially make reading materials available to children who might otherwise have limited access to them. They can also offer teachers additional resources and help children practise at their own pace.

But technology should be understood as part of the learning ecosystem rather than a substitute for it.

A digital platform can provide another reading passage, but it may not know why a child misunderstood the first one. A translation tool can make a sentence accessible in another language, but it cannot necessarily explain why the idea matters in the child’s own context. A tablet can put thousands of books within reach, but it cannot by itself create the curiosity that makes a child want to read them.

That human element remains central.

Children learn through relationships as much as through resources: through teachers who notice their difficulties, adults who listen to their questions, peers who help them understand a difficult idea and environments where they feel comfortable admitting that they do not know something.

Technology can strengthen these relationships and extend their reach. It cannot replace them.

What should we expect a literate child to be able to do?

Perhaps the most useful way to think about India’s child literacy challenge is to stop asking only whether a child can read and start asking what reading enables her to do.

Can she understand a health advisory and explain it to her family?

Can she follow written instructions without relying on someone else?

Can she understand a government form?

Can she compare two pieces of information and identify where they disagree?

Can she recognise when a piece of information is trying to persuade her rather than simply inform her?

Can she encounter an unfamiliar idea in a textbook and use what she already knows to make sense of it?

These abilities become particularly important as children grow up in an information-saturated world. Their sources of information are no longer limited to teachers and textbooks. They encounter messages on social media, videos, advertisements, websites, government notices and increasingly sophisticated forms of digital content.

Being able to read the words is not enough to navigate that world safely.

Children also need to understand, question and evaluate what those words are telling them.

In that sense, child literacy is closely connected to agency. A person who can independently understand written information has greater freedom to learn, make decisions, access public services and participate in society. Child literacy determines not only how a child performs in school but also how confidently she can navigate the institutions and information systems that shape adult life.

From learning to read to reading to learn

India’s progress in foundational learning should not be seen as the end of the child literacy conversation. It should give us the confidence to move to its next stage.

The question is no longer simply whether children are learning to read. It is whether they are developing the ability to use reading as a tool for learning.

That shift has implications for classrooms, teacher training, community programmes and the way children’s learning is assessed. It requires us to pay attention to comprehension, vocabulary, language, background knowledge and the different starting points from which children enter a classroom. It also requires us to recognise that the responsibility for literacy does not belong to schools alone.

Parents, communities, civil-society organisations, libraries and education systems all have a role in creating environments where children encounter language frequently and meaningfully.

The ultimate measure of child literacy is not how confidently a child can read a paragraph aloud in front of a teacher. It is what happens when the teacher is no longer there.

Can the child pick up a book and make sense of it? Can she encounter information she has never seen before and work through it? Can she ask questions of the text rather than simply accept it? Can she use what she has learned to understand something else?

That is when reading becomes learning.

And when reading becomes learning, child literacy becomes something much larger than a school outcome. It becomes a child’s ability to understand the world independently, participate in it with confidence and, eventually, have a greater say in shaping it.

FAQs

1. What is child literacy?

Child literacy refers to a child’s ability to read, understand and use written language. It involves more than recognising letters and words. Strong literacy also includes reading comprehension, vocabulary, interpretation and the ability to use information independently.

2. Why is reading comprehension important for children?

Reading comprehension allows children to understand ideas rather than simply pronounce words. It helps them follow instructions, understand textbooks, connect new information with what they already know and eventually learn independently.

3. What is the difference between reading and reading comprehension?

Reading can involve decoding written words and sentences, while reading comprehension involves understanding their meaning. A child may be able to read a passage aloud but still struggle to explain what the passage means.

4. What is the current state of child literacy in India?

India has made progress in foundational literacy, but learning levels remain uneven. Recent ASER findings show that many children can read at a basic level while still struggling to read and understand text expected of younger grades. This highlights the need to strengthen comprehension alongside foundational reading skills.

5. How does language affect children’s literacy?

The language in which children learn can significantly influence their ability to understand concepts and participate in classrooms. In multilingual India, using children’s home languages alongside the language of instruction can help strengthen comprehension and make learning more accessible.

6. What can teachers do to improve reading comprehension?

Teachers can ask children to explain what they have read, discuss stories, encourage questions, introduce unfamiliar vocabulary and connect texts with children’s experiences. Understanding where a child is struggling can also help teachers provide more appropriate support.

7. How can parents support children’s literacy at home?

Parents can encourage children to read regularly, talk about stories and everyday events, ask open-ended questions and allow children to explain ideas in their own words. Children do not necessarily need expensive learning materials. Regular conversations, storytelling and access to age-appropriate reading material can provide valuable opportunities to develop language and comprehension.

Summary

• National Education Day, observed on November 11 to mark Maulana Abul Kalam Azad’s birth anniversary, is usually associated with his role in building India’s post-Independence education system. But his educational vision was broader than the institutions he helped establish.
• Azad saw education as a means of creating informed, capable citizens, and his early post-Independence programme included an ambitious idea called “social education”, which connected adult literacy with citizenship, health, culture, economic participation and an understanding of rights and responsibilities.
• His vision also encompassed universal elementary education, women’s education, vocational and technical training, higher education, scientific research, Indian languages and cultural institutions.

The article examines the unfinished nature of that vision and connects it with contemporary challenges around foundational learning, adult literacy, digital skills and equitable access to education. India’s current education landscape shows that the central challenge has evolved from expanding access to ensuring meaningful learning and lifelong educational opportunity. ASER 2024 and the government’s ULLAS programme provide evidence of that continuing transition.

Azad’s real vision

Every November 11, India remembers Maulana Abul Kalam Azad as its first Education Minister, a freedom fighter, scholar and institution-builder. The familiar list follows: the University Grants Commission, the Indian Institutes of Technology, the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, the national academies of literature, music and art, and the expansion of technical and scientific education.

All of it is true. But it leaves out the fact that Azad’s formidable idea of education was considerably larger than the system of schools, colleges and universities that his name is usually associated with. He was thinking about education as a way of producing not simply literate people, or even employable people, but citizens capable of participating in a democracy. In the first years after Independence, that meant thinking simultaneously about the child entering a primary school, the adult who had never learnt to read, the young person being trained for an industrial economy and the citizen trying to understand what freedom meant in everyday life.

That broader idea has a surprisingly contemporary resonance.

Today, India’s education debate has moved from the question of whether children are enrolled to whether they are actually learning. Foundational literacy and numeracy have become national priorities; adult education has returned to the policy agenda through ULLAS; digital access has become part of educational opportunity; and policymakers increasingly talk about learning outcomes, skills, inclusion and lifelong learning.

More than seven decades ago, Azad was wrestling with a remarkably similar problem, although the vocabulary was different.

His question was: What kind of people should education produce, and what kind of country would those people build?

That is the question worth returning to on National Education Day.

The Education Minister who inherited an impossible problem

When Azad became independent India’s first Education Minister in August 1947, he inherited an education system designed under colonial conditions and serving a population in which access to education was deeply unequal.

The scale of the challenge was enormous. India had won political independence, but independence had not suddenly created teachers, classrooms, universities, laboratories or literate adults.

The government’s own historical accounts of the period describe education as a field in which scarce resources had to be carefully prioritised. Azad’s approach was therefore neither to choose between mass education and elite institutions nor to imagine that India could afford only one of them. His programme attempted to build several layers of the system at once: universal elementary education, adult education, secondary education, technical education and university education.

That is one of the least appreciated features of his educational thinking.

The IIT and the village school were not competing visions for Azad. They were parts of the same national project.

The establishment of IIT Kharagpur illustrates the point. The institute began in the former Hijli Detention Camp, a site associated with the freedom struggle, and was formally inaugurated as an IIT by Azad in August 1951. Its founding vision was not limited to producing engineers. The institution was expected to conduct research, produce research workers and train technical teachers, with standards comparable to leading institutions abroad.

At the other end of the system was the child who might never make it to secondary school.

Azad argued for free and compulsory basic education for children up to the age of 14, girls’ education, vocational education, agricultural education and technical education. He also supported education in the mother tongue at the primary level while recognising the continuing importance of English for higher education and international access.

The ambition was extraordinary.

The harder question was how a newly independent country would pay for it.

The forgotten experiment: education beyond the classroom

One of the most revealing parts of Azad’s educational legacy is not the IIT or the UGC. It is an initiative that has largely disappeared from popular accounts of National Education Day: social education.

In 1948, the Central Advisory Board of Education appointed a committee under Mohan Lal Saxena to develop a scheme for adult education and literacy. The committee argued that adult education should have a broader social purpose and coined the term “social education”. Its objectives went far beyond teaching adults to read and write.

The idea was strikingly expansive.

Social education was intended to cultivate an understanding of citizens’ rights and duties, encourage democratic participation, communicate knowledge about the country’s problems, deepen an understanding of India’s history and culture, promote health and hygiene, develop a cooperative spirit, provide craft training and create opportunities for cultural and recreational expression.

Literacy was the entry point.

Citizenship was the destination.

The programme was based on an understanding that an adult who could read a sentence but could not understand public institutions, health information, economic choices or civic responsibilities had not necessarily acquired the full benefits of education.

It was education as social participation.

Azad took particular interest in translating the idea into a national programme, even while the government faced severe financial constraints. A plan was made to earmark ₹1 crore for social education from an education budget of about ₹20 crore, with most of the money intended to reach states in proportion to their numbers of illiterate people.

The plan ultimately encountered the same problem that has followed Indian education policy for generations: ambition collided with resources.

Financial pressures, crop failures and the enormous demands of refugee rehabilitation after Partition constrained the government’s ability to deliver on its commitments.

But the episode reveals something essential about Azad’s thinking.

He did not regard literacy as a narrow technical skill. He regarded it as part of the process through which people became capable of participating in a new nation.

For Azad, a school was supposed to produce a citizen

One of Azad’s most revealing formulations concerned what education was ultimately supposed to accomplish.

At the first meeting of the Central Advisory Board of Education, he argued that the primary purpose of an education system was to create “balanced minds” that could not easily be misled.

That sentence is worth pausing over.

It shifts education away from examinations and towards judgement.

A person who can memorise information is educated in one sense. A person who can question, evaluate, reason and participate responsibly in public life is educated in another.

Azad’s emphasis on this distinction becomes more understandable when viewed against the circumstances in which he was working. India had emerged from colonial rule and Partition. It was trying to construct democratic institutions while managing extraordinary social and economic pressures. Education was therefore not simply a development programme. It was part of the infrastructure of democracy.

This is also why Azad’s concern with culture mattered.

He believed the cultural content of Indian education had been weakened under colonial rule and supported strengthening India’s literary, artistic and cultural institutions. His tenure saw the establishment of the Sangeet Natak Akademi, Sahitya Akademi and Lalit Kala Akademi, while the Indian Council for Cultural Relations was established in 1950.

In Azad’s conception, education was therefore not neatly divided into “academic” and “cultural” knowledge.

A nation needed scientists and engineers.

It also needed writers, artists, historians, musicians and citizens who understood the cultural complexity of the country they inhabited.

The language question was more complicated than it looks

Azad’s own intellectual life made the question of language particularly complicated.

He was an accomplished scholar of Urdu, Persian and Arabic, yet he did not advocate simply replacing English with an Indian language overnight. The government’s account of his educational thinking records his support for English because of its educational, national and international advantages, while insisting that primary education should be delivered through the mother tongue and that Indian languages needed to develop as educational languages.

This was not a contradiction so much as an attempt to negotiate two different realities.

Children learn most effectively when education speaks to the language they already understand.

At the same time, access to higher education, scientific literature and international knowledge requires access to wider linguistic resources.

The question remains familiar today.

India is still negotiating the relationship between mother tongues, regional languages, Hindi, English and increasingly digital forms of learning. The National Education Policy 2020 itself places considerable emphasis on local languages and on strengthening foundational literacy and numeracy in the early years.

Azad’s position was therefore neither anti-English nor indifferent to Indian languages.

It was more pragmatic: language should expand a learner’s access to knowledge, not become a barrier to it.

He wanted educational policy to learn from the classroom

Another part of Azad’s legacy that receives relatively little attention is his investment in educational research.

In 1947, he and Jawaharlal Nehru supported the establishment of the Central Institute of Education in Delhi, now the Department of Education at the University of Delhi. Azad did not envision it merely as a teacher-training institution. He wanted it to become a research centre capable of addressing the new educational problems facing the country.

That is a revealing choice.

A country trying to educate hundreds of millions of people cannot simply import a finished education system. It has to learn what works in its own classrooms, languages, communities and social circumstances.

In that sense, Azad’s educational architecture contained an idea that modern education policy would later rediscover: education systems need the capacity to learn about themselves.

The UGC similarly reflected the desire to create a national framework for university education. The University Grants Commission was formally inaugurated in 1953 by Azad and became a statutory body in 1956, with responsibility for coordination, standards and grants in higher education.

The institutional architecture mattered because Azad was trying to solve a problem larger than access.

He was trying to create a system.

The unfinished promise of universal education

There is, however, another side to Azad’s legacy that deserves attention precisely because it makes the story more honest.

The promise of universal education was not fulfilled quickly.

A recent NIEPA publication examining Azad’s relationship with the idea of a National System of Education points to an uncomfortable historical gap between the rhetoric of universal basic education and the ability of the post-Independence state to implement it. The volume notes that the right to education had a long constitutional history but that universal elementary education remained an unfinished project for decades.

That does not make Azad’s vision less important.

If anything, it makes the vision more instructive.

India’s education history is full of ambitious commitments followed by the slower, harder work of implementation. The distance between policy and classroom reality is not a new problem. It was already visible in the first years of the Republic.

And it remains visible today.

From access to learning: The problem has changed, but not disappeared

India has made enormous progress in expanding school access. The contemporary challenge is increasingly about what happens after a child enters school.

The ASER 2024 survey, which covered more than 650,000 children across more than 600 districts, found substantial recovery in basic learning levels after the pandemic. Yet the numbers also show why access cannot be treated as the end of the story. At the all-India level, 27.1% of children in Standard III could read a Standard II-level text in 2024, while 48.8% of Standard V children could do the same.

These are improvements, particularly in government schools, but they also reveal the scale of the remaining challenge.

Being enrolled is not the same as learning.

Having a school is not the same as having a good education.

And having access to a smartphone is not the same as having the ability to use technology productively for learning.

ASER’s 2024 survey began examining digital access and skills among 14–16-year-olds, an acknowledgement of how the meaning of educational opportunity has changed.

The vocabulary has changed since Azad’s time.

The underlying question has not.

What does a person need to know and be able to do to participate fully in society?

The return of the adult learner

Perhaps the most striking contemporary parallel is adult education.

India’s ULLAS — Nav Bharat Saaksharta Karyakram, running from 2022–23 to 2026–27, is designed for adults aged 15 and above who missed formal schooling. Its five components include foundational literacy and numeracy, critical life skills, basic education, vocational skills and continuing education.

That sounds remarkably close to the expansive philosophy behind Azad’s social education programme.

The modern language is different. The technologies are different. The economy is different.

But the premise remains: education does not end at the school gate.

ULLAS also places community participation at the centre of its approach, seeking to use volunteers, schools and technology to expand literacy and lifelong learning.

That is precisely where the history becomes relevant to organisations working at the grassroots.

Because the hardest educational problems are rarely solved by a textbook alone.

What National Education Day can mean for a child outside the system

For an organisation working with underserved communities, Maulana Azad’s legacy offers a useful way of thinking about education that is broader than enrolment.

A child may be technically enrolled in school and still be struggling to read at grade level.

She may have a classroom but no quiet place to study at home.

A child may have a teacher but lack access to books, technology or additional academic support.

A teenager may remain in school but have no exposure to STEM, career guidance or vocational pathways.

And an adult in the same household may be unable to read the form that determines whether the family receives a government benefit.

These are not separate educational problems but are connected.

Smile Foundation’s current Mission Education work reflects this more holistic understanding. Its education programme reports reaching more than 1.85 lakh children, working through learning centres and government schools while combining foundational literacy and numeracy with teacher development, digital learning, STEM education, school health and community engagement.

Its approach is also explicitly rooted in the idea that education cannot always be separated from the conditions in which a child lives. The organisation describes education as both a means of improving livelihoods and an end in itself because it increases awareness of rights, health and social responsibilities.

That philosophy comes surprisingly close to the older idea of social education.

The unfinished lesson of November 11

National Education Day is often treated as a day to remember a historical figure.

It may be more useful to treat it as a day to interrogate a historical question.

Azad inherited a country in which education had to do several things at once. It had to repair the exclusions of the past, create a workforce for a modern economy, develop universities and scientific institutions, strengthen Indian culture, educate women and children, and teach citizens how to inhabit a democracy.

He never solved all of those problems.

No education minister could.

But he understood something that remains easy to lose in contemporary debates: education is not merely a service delivered to an individual. It is one of the ways a society decides what kind of future it wants to have.

That is why his legacy stretches from the primary school to the IIT, from the adult literacy centre to the university, from the mother tongue to international scholarship, and from scientific research to literature and the arts.

The most interesting part of his legacy may therefore be the part that has received the least attention.

Azad did not believe that teaching someone to read was enough.

He wanted education to give people the ability to understand their society, exercise their rights, fulfil their responsibilities, participate in democracy, earn a livelihood and live with dignity.

More than seventy years later, India has made extraordinary progress towards some of those goals while still struggling with others.

Perhaps that is what National Education Day should ask us to remember.

Not simply that Maulana Abul Kalam Azad built institutions.

But that he believed the ultimate institution education was meant to build was the citizen.

And that institution, unlike a university or a school, is never finished.

FAQs

Why is November 11 celebrated as National Education Day?

November 11 is observed as National Education Day in India to commemorate the birth anniversary of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, independent India’s first Education Minister, who played a foundational role in shaping the country’s post-Independence education system. The Government of India began observing the day as National Education Day in 2008.

Who was Maulana Abul Kalam Azad?

Maulana Abul Kalam Azad was a freedom fighter, scholar, journalist and India’s first Education Minister after Independence. He served as Education Minister from 1947 until his death in 1958 and played an important role in developing India’s systems of school, university, technical and cultural education.

What was Maulana Azad’s contribution to Indian education?

Azad helped establish or strengthen major educational and cultural institutions, including the University Grants Commission, IIT Kharagpur, the Indian Council for Cultural Relations and the national academies for literature, visual arts and performing arts. He also advocated universal basic education, adult education, women’s education, vocational training and technical education.

What did Maulana Azad believe about education?

Azad viewed education as a tool of individual development, social transformation and nation-building. His educational thinking included universal basic education, adult literacy, technical education, higher education, cultural development and the creation of informed citizens capable of participating in democratic life.

What was Maulana Azad’s idea of social education?

Social education was an early post-Independence approach to adult education that went beyond basic literacy. It aimed to develop knowledge of citizenship, rights and duties, health, culture, economic life and social cooperation alongside reading and writing skills.

Why is foundational literacy important today?

Foundational literacy and numeracy are essential because school enrolment alone does not guarantee that children acquire the basic reading, writing and mathematical skills needed for later learni