The Gujarat government is set to drop the Ekum Kasauti, a system of weekly, fortnightly and monthly unit tests, from nearly 40,000 primary and secondary government schools in the state. The change will be effective from the academic session of 2025-26, starting June. The Ekum Kasauti, which has been implemented for the last six years as a periodic assessment test (PAT) system, is currently used to evaluate students from Classes I to XII. The tests are conducted by the Gujarat Council of Education Research and Training (GCERT) from Class I to VIII, and by the Gujarat Secondary and Higher Secondary Education Board (GHSHEB) for Class 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. “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,” State Education Minister Kuber Dindor told The Indian Express. “Teachers were overburdened with the additional workload of uploading the results of each weekly test on the XAMTA app (developed by a private firm by the same name), to be sent to the Vidya Samiksha Kendra (VSK) in Gandhinagar. While one day would go in conducting these weekly tests, two days would go in uploading and another day would be spent on remedial teaching. After all this, nobody knows how and where all this data is used,” said Divijaysinh Jadeja, president of Gujarat Primary Teachers Association and one of the ten members of the committee, to The Indian Express. 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, to The Indian Express. 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.
