The Gujarat government is set to discontinue the Ekum Kasauti system—a periodic assessment model involving weekly, fortnightly, and monthly unit tests—across nearly 40,000 primary and secondary government schools in the state.
The change will come into effect from the 2025–26 academic session, beginning in June.
Implemented over the past six years, the Ekum Kasauti served as a regular evaluation system for students from Classes I to XII. Assessments for Classes I to VIII were conducted by the Gujarat Council of Education Research and Training (GCERT), while the Gujarat Secondary and Higher Secondary Education Board (GSHSEB) oversaw the process for Classes IX to XII.
After protests and continued opposition to the unit tests by teachers and educationists from over 33,000 government primary schools across the state, a “360 degree assessment committee” was formed on March 3 by the education department. The committee was to submit its recommendations for alternative assessments by May 2025.
According to State Education Minister Kuber Dindor “The new assessment methodology to replace it from the academic session 2025-26 will be framed keeping in mind the National Education Policy 2020, which stresses on reducing the burden of exams and a 360-degree evaluation”.
According to sources, teachers were significantly overburdened by the additional task of uploading the results of each weekly test onto the XAMTA app, developed by a private firm of the same name. These results were then forwarded to the Vidya Samiksha Kendra (VSK) in Gandhinagar.
“One entire day would be spent conducting the weekly tests, followed by two more days just uploading the data. Another day would go into remedial teaching,” said Divijaysinh Jadeja, president of the Gujarat Primary Teachers Association and a member of the 10-member committee reviewing the evaluation system. “Despite all this effort, there is no clarity on how or where this data is actually utilized.”
The withdrawal of the unit tests will subsequently also change the functioning of VSK in Gandhinagar. The centre, which has been much acclaimed by the state government, lauded by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and visited by several delegates from other states as well as abroad, collects and analyses over 500 crore data-sets per annum, including the online attendance of teachers and students and unit test results.
VSK was launched on a pilot basis in 2019 as a command and control centre, and got its own technology-equipped building in 2021. It bagged the PM Award for Excellence in Public Administration in the year 2021.
The state-level ‘360 degree’ committee is under the chairmanship of Jayendrasinh Jadav, educationist and registrar of the Gujarat Sahitya Academy Gandhinagar, with Gaurang Vyas as member-secretary, and has ten other members that include representatives of primary and secondary teachers’ associations.
“The entire education system in Gujarat had collapsed because of Ekum Kasauti. This is the reason why the state also lagged behind in some of the major assessment reports. We have been protesting against this assessment system for over three years and have repeatedly requested the state government to re-think,” said Nalin Pandit, one of those ten members.
Pandit worked in the education department from the 1980s to 2007, when he retired as the director of Gujarat Council of Education Research and Training (GCERT).
Now associated with voluntarily teaching children of the Nes (a cluster of houses in the notified sanctuary areas of Gir forest including districts of Gir Somnath, Junagadh and Amreli), Pandit had also led a statewide protest fast which was joined by thousands of government teachers late last year, demanding withdrawal of the Ekum Kasauti.
After the first meeting that was held on March 6 and second on April 16, the committee, which is scheduled to meet for the third time since its formation on April 25 and 26 in Bhavnagar, will finalise the assessment methods for students of Balmandir (kindergarten) till Class II.
Three sub-committees have been formed after the second meeting-for Balmandir and Class I and II, the second for Classes III to V and the third committee for Classes VI-VIII. The GSHSEB that looks after secondary and higher secondary schools will be asked to form similar committees for higher classes.
“While every teachers association raised this one question about the findings of this humongous data and its use, the changes that were supposed to be implemented with the help of this data analysis were never done,” Pandit claimed.
Major protests against the Ekum Kasauti in 2021-22, with teachers citing it as an “over-burdening” and “time-consuming” exercise, had led the education department to bring in some changes and reduce the frequency of the tests in the following year.