Is the APAAR ID for students mandatory? | Explained

Activists and parents concerned about schools pushing APAAR ID, part of NEP 2020, for academic record-keeping, despite being voluntary.

The story so far:

Activists and parents are worried about the rapid push by schools to generate an APAAR ID. APAAR is part of the National Education Policy (NEP), 2020’s record-keeping reforms, and while it is voluntary, States and school authorities have pushed students to enrol in it.

APAAR stands for Automated Permanent Academic Account Registry. The registry enables what the government describes as the ‘One Nation, One Student ID’, in order to “accumulate and store [students’] academic accomplishments, facilitating seamless transitions between institutions for the pursuit of further education”. The APAAR ID is linked to Aadhaar and is stored in the DigiLocker. The registry provides students with standardised data on their marksheets and institutional affiliation. The system is touted as a way for different educational institutes to rapidly process and verify any given student’s academic transcripts. APAAR is generated through the Unified District Information System For Education Plus (UDISE+) portal, which contains regional academic statistics and data on schools, teachers and students.

The ID is a key aspect of NEP 2020’s mandate to overhaul education data collection for policymaking and analysis. The Education Ministry has been pushing schools affiliated with the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) to get “100% saturation” with respect to students registering for an APAAR ID.

APAAR is not mandatory, according to a document posted on the ID’s official site. However, circulars by the CBSE, and FAQ pages that have been published by the government, do not make this clear. The government has instead described the benefits of APAAR to students, such as permanently recording data on “transfer from one school to the other, entrance examination, admission, job application, skilling, upskilling,” and so on. While there is no law mandating its use, the CBSE and States like Uttar Pradesh have laid out expectations to schools, under their umbrella, that the ID should be issued to all students. Parents often do not receive any information which clearly spells out that the programme is voluntary. The Union government re-confirmed the optional nature of APAAR in response to a Parliament query in December 2024.

There is still a lack of clarity over the genesis of the APAAR programme. When the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) attempted to file a Right to Information application on its policy documents, the Union government transferred the advocacy’s application over 30 times, with no clear answer for months. “The datasets slated to be collected through APAAR enrolment are not limited to just educational certificates and grades, but spread far and wide,” the IFF wrote in 2023. Besides, the large-scale collection of data of minors without a law to back it up, the IFF argues, is unconstitutional. Moreover, teachers have questioned the need for APAAR, arguing that the data that APAAR collects is already collated by teachers for the UDISE+, thus duplicating a significant amount of administrative work in schools.

“Additionally, Section 9(3) of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 specifically prohibits “tracking or behavioural monitoring of children or targeted advertising directed at children” by entities,” the IFF points out. “Having open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and channels of data sharing without any robust safeguards, can expose children’s data to third parties who may use it for such purposes. Before it is rolled out, any such interfaces must be secured and legal safeguards put in place. There is an added responsibility on the APAAR framework to ensure cyber security, as the data being processed pertains to children..”.