Padhe Bharat Badhe Bharat

The Ministry of Human Resource Development launched the Padhe Bharat Badhe Bharat programme in 2014. It is a sub-programme under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan programme. Generally, kids who cannot read during their early education tend to struggle in subjects in their higher education.

The Padhe Bharat Badhe Bharat programme seeks to improve children’s reading, writing, and mathematical skills studying in government primary schools. It ensures quality education in the foundational years of schooling. It provides various facilities such as reading material for children, an ideal environment full of books and timely distribution of reading material.

The Padhe Bharat Badhe Bharat programme also has an appraisal system and mentoring of new teachers. The teachers are a crucial part of making the programme successful in the long run, and they are responsible for finishing the curriculum within the prescribed time. The teaching will be primarily done in the mother tongue.

The Padhe Bharat Badhe Bharat is a sub-component of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA), which is now integrated with the Samagra Shiksha scheme. Thus, currently, the Padhe Bharat Badhe Bharat is being implemented by the Ministry of Education as it is now continued under the Samagra Shiksha scheme.

Recently, the Ministry of Education launched a 100-day reading campaign, ‘Padhe Bharat’ from 1 January to 10 April 2022. This campaign aligns with the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, which promotes joyful reading culture for children by ensuring age-appropriate reading books availability for children in regional, local, mother tongue or tribal languages.

Objectives of Padhe Bharat Badhe Bharat

• To enable children to be independent, motivated, and engaged writers and readers with comprehension possessing lasting and sustainable skills to achieve learning levels appropriate to their classes.
• To make children understand the reasoning in the domain of measurement, number, and shapes. 
• To enable children to become independent in problem-solving through spatial understanding and numeracy skills.
• To associate writing and reading with the experience of natural and joyful life situations.
• To recognise the social perspective of home to school transition and the role of children’s literature in the process of building engaged and independent writers and readers.

The government plans to achieve the objectives of Padhe Bharat Badhe Bharat by:

• Initiating dialogue with headteachers, teachers, parents, policymakers and educational administrators to draw attention to the pedagogy of writing, reading and early mathematics.
• Creating sensitisation about the children’s needs of class I and II concerning meaningful writing, reading, and early mathematics processes.
• Creating a cadre of teachers and resource groups well acquainted with the writing, reading and early mathematics pedagogy.
• Creating a vibrant school and classroom environment conducive to early writing, reading, and mathematics.

Components of Padhe Bharat Badhe Bharat

The Padhe Bharat Badhe Bharat is a nationwide programme planned with the following twin-track approaches:

• To improve language development by creating an enduring interest in writing and reading with comprehension.
• To create a positive and natural interest in mathematics related to the social and physical world.

In short, the two tracks of Padhe Bharat Badhe Bharat are:

• Early mathematics.
• Early reading and writing with comprehension.

The two-track approaches of the Padhe Bharat Badhe Bharat programme have been classified as follows:

System-Level Component

• The Academic Authority will create the design, material development and curriculum for early reading, writing and elementary mathematics as per Section 29 of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009. The academic authorities are the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) and the State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT).
• State policy level clarity on the medium of instruction. 
• Early writing and reading with comprehension and mathematics components in pre and in-service teacher training programmes.
• Capacity building of teacher educators [SCERTs, District Institute for Education and Training (DIETs) and Resource Persons (RPs)].
• Capacity building of educational administrators [Director (EE), district education officers and block education officers].
• Capacity building of headteachers on leadership to lead the programme.
• Capacity Building of School Management Committees (SMCs).
• Development of region-specific, graded and interesting children literature in local languages and resources in mathematics.
• Research and evaluation in writing, reading and mathematics areas at regular intervals and review of the programme on a cycle approach. 

School – Classroom Component

• Learning environment.
• Enabling classroom transactions through sustained and active engagement with every child.
• Connecting classroom with community.
• Assessment as learning.
• Monitoring System.

Benefits of Padhe Bharat Badhe Bharat

The benefits of the Padhe Bharat Badhe Bharat programme are as follows:

• It ensures that maximum children get access to primary education.
• It emphasises learning in the mother tongue and initiates children to the joys of literature and mathematics, which are two important fundamental subjects.
• It provides an ease to children by providing reading materials in a language in which they are comfortable and introducing them to books in English later on, which is necessary to do well in life.

Implementation of Padhe Bharat Badhe Bharat

The Ministry of Education is monitoring the programme at the central level. The state-level functionaries are the SSA state programme officer (Pedagogy), SSA state project director, and Director of SCERT. It is implemented by the District Education Officer (DEO) or the District Probation Officer (DPO) in the districts and by the Block Education Officers (BEOs) at the block level.

The Central Government has taken several steps toward the implementation of the Padhe Bharat Badhe Bharat programme, which include the following:

• Preparation of special bridge materials for states having high tribal populations.
• Providing free textbooks, procurement and development of supplementary reading material.
• In-service teacher training programmes.
• Having dedicated teachers for foundational classes and maintaining the required Pupil-Teacher Ratio (PTR) provided under the RTE Act.

States/UTs are implementing the Padhe Bharat Badhe Bharat in their respective states/UTs using multiple approaches and strategies, which include:

• Adoption of NCERT model of early reading.
• Provision of supplementary reading material.
• Development of state-specific models for early reading and maths. 
• Collaboration with organisations like UNICEF.