While all State and Central governments have the need to maintain master data within the education domain, few have managed to successfully collect and keep it up to date. Almost no system today has exposed reusable registries for others to build on.
It is essential that data about schools, teachers, students, administrative officials, subjects, textbooks, etc. are maintained through a set of federated 4th generation registries (not kept central, but kept within various State/ Centre/ department systems which are the primary keeper of that data).
The registries must be designed to be easily accessible by other building blocks and usable through “registry-as-a-service with open APIs” beyond the traditional portals for end users to view and access. School, teacher, and student are core registries envisaged in NDEAR (across federated levels and not as a central database).
School Registry
Currently, each school is uniquely identified by a Unified District Information on School Education (UDISE) code. In addition to these, there are multiple schools / institutions which are not onboarded on UDISE+ or may be using their own codes for institutes. There is a need for a master registry to facilitate institution controlled CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations while keeping attestations/approvals to appropriate authorities and act as a single source of truth for all other building blocks and systems. UDISE code has been recognised for the purpose of uniquely identifying schools, pre-schools, vocational training institutes and other institutions pertaining to school education. UDISE+ shall be augmented with the features required to perform School Registry with open APIs.
Teacher Registry
Teachers have multiple entry and exit points in the education system and shall require the teacher registry to be maintained at the Central level or at the State level with national access (with necessary access control and consent flows). Student and Teacher Directory may leverage Aadhaar, PAN or other existing identifiers for unique identification as necessary.
Student Registry
It is important to standardize how students are identified at any point. For the entire lifecycle, a student has multiple entry and exit points into and from the education system. Different IDs are allotted which are only relevant within the scope of a limited digital environment and thus calls for a unified, but decentralized registry for students. It will be used to help students, parents, and teachers map and facilitate the entire journey of a student spanning across different stages of scholarly life including childhood care, school education, distance learning, up-skilling and vocational training. This ensures that the education records created for a student can be issued to the correct individual, in the control of the student/ parent, and can be shared/ used using consented access. By providing control of the record back to the student/ parent, the record and contact information can be kept updated by the student/ parent.