NAS Learning Explorer
What do children in India's government schools actually know? The National Achievement Survey (NAS) tests Classes 3, 5, 8 and 10 on the school curriculum — language, maths, science, social science — and this ranks how each state does. The curriculum-aligned companion to the ASER household survey: ASER asks whether a child can read at all; NAS asks how much of the syllabus they've mastered.
What is NAS — and why it matters
Once every few years, NCERT tests a huge sample of government and government-aided school children — 3.4 million students in 2021 — on what the curriculum says they should have learned by Class 3, 5, 8 and 10. The score is the average percentage of questions answered correctly. It is the official, curriculum-referenced counterpart to ASER's simpler "can they read a Std II text" test — and the two tell a consistent, sobering story: performance falls sharply as children move up the grades, from about 60% correct in Class 3 to the mid-30s by Class 10. NAS is the number education departments are held to.
▸ How to read this explorer
- Start with the question. Tap any underlined word to change the class, the subject, or the view.
- Every score is "average % correct" on the NAS test for that class and subject. Higher is better; the dashed line marks the All-India average.
- Watch the grades fall. Switch from Class 3 to Class 8 to 10 on the same subject to see mastery erode as the syllabus gets harder.
- Four views: Rank the states, Zoom into the districts of a state (720 districts), Break down the skills a single district struggles with, or List the table.
Making sense of the numbers
What the score means. Each figure is the average share of test questions a state's Class-3/5/8/10 students answered correctly in NAS 2021, for that subject. It is a curriculum-referenced measure — "how much of what you were supposed to learn did you learn" — unlike ASER, which measures a single foundational floor (can the child read a Std II paragraph, do a subtraction). Both matter; read together, ASER tells you if the floor is missing and NAS tells you how far short of the ceiling a state falls.
Reading it responsibly. NAS covers government and government-aided schools, so it says little about the private sector where a large share of Indian children now study. The steep grade-on-grade decline is the headline finding — a Class 10 cohort scoring in the 30s is a system-wide signal, not a single state's failing. And a percentage-correct score depends on how hard that year's paper was, so compare states within a class and subject, against the All-India line, rather than across classes as if they were the same test.
State, district and skill. State scores are the official NAS 2021 subject figures, validated against the published National Report Card (Class 3 language 61.9%, Class 8 maths 36.0%, Class 10 maths 32.1%). District scores (the "zoom into the districts" view) are derived: rolled up from the official district learning-outcome data, they reproduce the exact subject scores within about half a point on average (median 0.4pt; a few cells differ by up to ~4pt), and are labelled as a derivation, not the exact IRT-scaled official number. The "break down the skills" view is the opposite — it shows the exact, official district performance on each individual learning outcome, no aggregation. Together: state and skill are exact; the district ranking is a close, honest approximation across all 720 districts.
Data from the National Achievement Survey 2021 (NCERT, Department of School Education & Literacy, Ministry of Education), as released on the NAS dashboard. This is an independent, source-linked interface for learning and discussion — for methodology and authoritative interpretation, consult NCERT directly. ImpactMojo is not affiliated with NCERT.