School students to get a new ID called Apaar. Activists are worried

In September 2024, the government of Assam announced that it was proceeding with the implementation of an online registry for school students, known as the Automated Permanent Academic Account Registry.

The registry, also known as Apaar, was introduced by the Union government as an extension of a recommendation in the National Education Policy 2020 that the government set up an online “academic bank” to store information about credits that students earned during their higher studies.

Under the Apaar system, school students are assigned a 12-digit identification number, using which they can access their academic records online. Students are required to provide their Aadhaar numbers in order to generate their Apaar numbers.

In October 2023, the Union government wrote to states and union territories, asking them to seek the consent of parents of school students to generate their Apaar numbers, “based on Aadhaar number of each student”. It noted that the data would be kept confidential and that the Aadhaar number “will be masked while sharing the data with other government users”.

The letter stated that the system would “digitally store all achievements of students like exam results, holistic report card, learning outcomes besides other achievements of students be it Olympiad, sports, skill training or any field”. According to the Apaar website, it “empowers students to accumulate and store their academic accomplishments, facilitating seamless transitions between institutions for the pursuit of further education”.

The Union education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, underlined these claims at the inauguration of a national conference on the registry in February 2024, titled “APAAR: One Nation One Student ID Card”. He said, “Apaar IDs were introduced to address the need for a singular unified identity to streamline interactions throughout a student’s academic journey.”

While the website does not provide details of the personnel responsible for implementing APAAR, it states that it is “powered” by the Digital India Corporation and the ministry of electronics and information technology.

A misguided move

Despite the government’s claims of the benefits of this move, activists told Scroll that introducing a digital registry like Apaar was a misguided step at a time when the country was a long way from universal digital literacy, and when the government was still struggling to ensure that all schools in the country have basic amenities.

“This initiative is intended to divert the attention of parents and children from the basic issue of poor quality public education,” said Niranjanaradhya VP, an education activist based in Karnataka.

Anil Kumar Roy, an education activist based in Bihar, said that the example of Aadhaar was revealing of the problems that could arise as a result of forcing technological initiatives onto a society that was not fully digitally literate. He observed that thousands of students in Bihar had been deprived of various benefits, such as direct transfers of money to their families because they didn’t have bank accounts or Aadhaar cards.

“Many teachers and principals in Bihar don’t possess a laptop and don’t know how to use computers to feed in student details for them to avail benefits,” he said. “They rely on the staff in cyber cafes to do this work. If Apaar is introduced, it will push students out of schools.”

Activists also argued that some of the government’s stated aims for Apaar were redundant.

For instance, it contends that with the numbers, it will be able to monitor schools better and thus curb dropout rates. Prince Gajendra Babu, the state secretary of the State Platform for Common School System, Tamil Nadu, said that the government already has a database of the number of students in the system.

“Through the Educational Management Information System and the Unified District Information System for Education Plus, the government already has details of the number of schools, facilities and student strength in all schools,” he said.

This system allowed local administrations to monitor data such as dropout rates at the local levels. “It is the teachers and the school management systems that are responsible for maintaining attendance of students,” he said. “There are already measures in place to address the issues, the need is to improve these systems and to ensure they function properly.”

Unnecessary tracking

Activists also argued that a system like Apaar would allow the government to monitor students too closely and thus represented a threat to diversity and freedom in education. “There is no need to track children if we give them good quality education,” said Niranjanaradhya VP.

Many fear that such an extensive database would also allow the government to classify students based on their political ideologies, and identify dissenting voices. “Anybody who is challenging the establishment could be targeted,” Babu said.

A database like that of Apaar could be easily misused for private profiteering, activists said. “This database will be sold to big private universities that will lure students in,” Niranjanaradhya said. “Ed tech companies also stand to profit from such digitisation.”

Babu noted, “All data will be treated as commodities.”

Many cited the case of Aadhaar as a warning – the identification number was first introduced as an option for citizens but was eventually made mandatory. “Already Aadhar data has been compromised,” Babu said. “Who is to say that this data will not leak?”

Though the ministry of education states on the Apaar website that minor students have to procure parental consent in order to generate their identification numbers, activists do not believe this will serve as a check against coercing families into accepting the system. “Schools will force parents to give their consent,” said Niranjanaradhya. “How are parents, especially those who may not be educated, going to be able to make informed decisions about this initiative? They are going to agree to it if schools demand it.”

Activists are also worried that the central government will force the Apaar system on states. “Already the union government is refusing to release funds to states that have refused to implement the new education policy,” Niranjanaradhya said. He was referring to the Union government’s refusal to release funds under the Samagra Shiksha scheme to Tamil Nadu in response to the state’s refusal to implement certain provisions in the New Education Policy, such as the three-language policy. Now, he added, there was a risk that the Centre would force the identification system on states.

Anil Kumar Roy argued that the measures were part of “the government’s attempt to centralise everything”. He argued, “The Centre wants to have the information of all students in its hands. Like ‘one nation, one election’, the government wants to homogenise schools and education and weaken the federal nature of governance.”

Burden on overstretched systems

Teachers are already burdened with teaching and administrative work, activists pointed out. Forcing them to take on the humongous task of digitising all their students’ records would only increase this burden, they said. A teacher from Tamil Nadu agreed. “We already have so much work, with feeding information into the Educational Management Information System, maintaining hard copies, doing other administrative work and teaching,” the teacher said. “If they give us more work, I am sure it will severely affect the teaching.”

Niranjanaradhya argued that the government should first focus on ensuring that schools were functioning as they should, and tackling problems such as the shortage of teachers. “Schools don’t have toilets, drinking water, basic infrastructure, and there are so many single-teacher schools,” he said. “The government should be solving these issues first. Instead, it is making things more complicated by introducing these complex ideas.”

He argued that the government should prioritise the implementation of the Right to Education Act, which guarantees every child between the ages of six and 14 a free education. “As per the available data, the RTE compliance in the nation is at just 25.5% and in Assam it is as low as 11.5%,” he said. “In what context is this our priority?”

Further, he added, “We are initiating all other schemes and programmes in the education field except providing equitable quality education to all the children in this country.”