Dr. Wilima Wadhwa, Director- Statistics of the ASER Centre

Cycle Of ASER

May-June
The cycle of ASER starts in somewhere in about May. May-June we are thinking of what are the new things we are putting in next years ASER? So all of our pilating starts. Because anything new you have to pilate it in the field first, otherwise you don’t get consistent things back

July-August-September
Then by July-August we are planning to start our national workshop. Like getting together the master trainers, that whole process. So July-August-September is the training process, as you can’t do it all in one place.

October-November
Then actual survey happens, in the month of October and November.

December- January
By December the data starts coming in. We freeze the data. This year we froze the data on 1st of January. Our report came out on 13th of January. After the report is out in January; now there is all dissemination which will go on till next two or three months. Each state will have their release.
Since the data is frozen this reports that comes out is really a provisional report. So now all the final data, some districts the data comes from, specially the northeast because of the remoteness, some data will come now.

March.
And final we reprocess it and final report will be put up hopefully on our website by March.

Impacts Of ASER
Slowly this is now the fourth year of ASER. As you can imagine given what our learning numbers are, there was a lot of skepticism in the government in terms of accepting these numbers.
Now state governments use it as a routinely to plan their activity. In fact people wait for ASER results. Our National report was released on the 13th of January and Bihar’s report was release on the 17th and the Chief Minister released it.

Given that there are no learning estimates available, it has become a standard tool that now state administration use. Now there are about 14 state governments, who are working with us, in terms of teacher training and so on.
ASER has being mentioned in the 11th plan document. There is always a back and fourth with the government in terms of the validity of the numbers. But there is general acceptance.

To quote Nitish Kumar, he said ‘ Apne Hume is saal chunauti di hai. Ab aap agle saal dekhna ASER ka aser’.
Slowly but surely we are making an impact. This year the other big thing happened with ASER is Pakistan has decided to do ASER. They are finishing up. They haven’t done it all over but they have done about 40 districts. So we are waiting for the results. They have adopted the same methodology. Now Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda want to do it. People from there came and attended our National workshops, when we were in the training process. They are now starting in their country too

Maintaining quality
There are various things, elements that goes in maintaining quality. One is that we have a consistent set of tools. Every year we have common things. The core of ASER is learning and we add some new things.
In terms of data consistency we have similar checks every year on the data. Sampling decisions are taken centrally. It is the citizen’s efforts so; there are a huge number of volunteers involved.

Approximately about 20,000 volunteers were involved in this. The survey is done by the volunteers, but the training we do. So we have master trainers in every state. They go out and train the volunteers.
The volunteers fill out the form that is send to states. We have about 8- 10 data centers. Because there is so much data, and we want to report out so fast, no one place can handle it.
The data is entered across the country in different places and then sent to a central location, which is then put together. All the data is processed in Delhi, so that is centralised.

At each step we have a lot of checks and measures. In fact this year we also did a recheck. So our master trainers after the survey was over, we asked them to go back to four villages to recheck.

Volunteers do the survey and we never had an issue with them. But the whole thing about volunteers is, they are very enthusiastic, we are not paying people to do the survey. But even then we go back to do random checks whether the survey was done. We have done now random checks at the data entering centers because even at the data entry level we give instructions about checking the data, while its been inputted. There again there are checks being done.