India, July 15 -- When our government launched the NIPUN Bharat Mission in 2021, we set ourselves a goal that was simple to state but difficult to achieve: every child in India should be able to read with understanding and perform basic mathematics by the end of Grade 3. Five years later, the evidence shows that India has begun a quiet but transformative shift in foundational learning. India has never lacked ambition in education. We built one of the largest school systems in the world, with 25 crore students, 98 lakh teachers and 15 lakh schools, bringing almost every child into a classroom. But enrolment was only the beginning. For too many years, children progressed through the early grades without acquiring foundational literacy and num...