ASER Centre
Evidence for actionASER 2022
About ASER 2022
The Annual Status of Education Report, or ASER, is an annual, citizen-led household survey that aims to understand whether children in rural India are enrolled in school and whether they are learning. From 2005 to 2014, and then every alternate year till 2018, large-scale, nation-wide ASER surveys provided representative estimates of the enrolment status of children aged 3-16 and the basic reading and arithmetic levels of children aged 5-16 at the national, state and district level.
COVID-19 brought this alternate-year cycle to a halt, and the large-scale field survey was replaced by phone-based surveys in 2020 and 2021. ASER 2022 marks the resumption of nation-wide field operations for the first time since the pandemic. Evidence on children’s enrolment and learning is an important input for districts, states, and the country as a whole to understand where children are and the kind of support they need, especially after the long period of school closures during the pandemic-induced lockdowns. ASER 2022 is returning to villages across India to generate this evidence.
ASER 2022 will reach more than 17,000 villages in almost all rural districts of the country, and will provide representative estimates of the schooling status of children aged 3-16 and the learning levels of children aged 5-16. Comparisons with earlier rounds of ASER will give us a clear picture of the effects of the pandemic on the status of education in rural India.