Pratham is an India-based NGO. Pratham’s vision is “every child in school … and learning well”. Pratham bases itself on a triangular partnership: the government, the corporate sector and the citizens. In each city, the corporate leaders take the lead, the government responds by opening its school and sharing its facilities, and the community volunteers, mostly young enthusiastic women from slums, implement the Pratham programmes.

Due to its simple approach and participation, the stature of Pratham has grown over the years and from being a Mumbai-based two-person project in 1994 and Pratham has now spread to 21 states across India.

The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) is a survey of the quality of education in India, and has been conducted each year since 2005 by Pratham. ASER seeks to fill a gap in educational data by looking to provide a reliable set of data at the national level, that is comprehensive and, at the same time, easy to understand. The survey’s stated objectives are twofold: (i) to get reliable estimates of the status of children’s schooling and basic learning (reading and arithmetic level) at the district level; and (ii) to measure the change in these basic learning and school statistics from last year.

ASER surveys all the rural districts in India, selecting 30 villages from each district and 20 households from each village. This gives a total of 600 households per village. The villages are selected using a Probability Proportional to Size (PPS) sampling technique.

ASER is carried out in a campaign mode and is a truly national project. Pratham looks to involve ordinary citizens in the process of data collection and survey. In order to train these surveyors, workshops are held where the necessary skills are imparted. After the trainings are complete, the survey takes place and upon its completion, the results are sent in to Pratham by the surveyors themselves.

A key concept that ASER promotes is that of sharing. Not only is the entire survey process people-drive, the costs are also shared by the attendees. The minimal costs of travel to the district and data-collection, a process that lasts for a day or two, are covered by the surveyors themselves.

As mentioned, ASER has sought to gather information on very basic learning instruments, which are reading and arithmetic. A set of core questions have been designed and these remain the same every year, but each year additional sets of questions are added to explore different dimensions of schooling and learning at the elementary stage. This ensures that the data is comparable and easily collected by the surveyors.

Over the years, Pratham and ASER have won many accolades for their efforts in the field of education. The novel approaches to issues in the field remain quite unique in the region, and at the global stage, at large.