The birth of aser

I remember a hot summer day, almost ten years ago, in a village in Sultanpur district in Uttar Pradesh. We were making a village report card. 2 Before starting work in a village we always did this exercise. Our goal then, as it is even today, was to work with people in the village to ensure that “every child is in school and learning well”. So we would go to every household in the village, and ask every child if he or she went to school. Ten years ago, even in UP, school enrollment levels were high. In some villages, well over 90% of children between the ages of six and fourteen were enrolled in school. But for us, it was important to go beyond schooling and try to get a sense of what a child could do. We used very basic benchmarks for learning - each and every child of elementary school age in the village was asked to read a set of common words and simple paragraphs. In arithmetic, there were numbers to be named and a set of simple arithmetic operations to do