The Annual Status of Education Reports (ASERs) have become a defining standard for the status of school education in India.
ASER 2021 covers, by and large, the Covid-19 period when children were largely out of school. On the positive side, ASER 2021 shows that families have not lost their faith in education.
Covid-19 notwithstanding, school enrolments have not suffered much, although enrolment patterns have shifted. Even today, only 4.6 per cent children in the age group 6-14 years are not currently enrolled. Among enrolled children, across all school grades, almost 92 per cent of children have textbooks for their current grade.
However, other trends suggested by the ASER 2021 data are more worrisome.