The state cabinet of Maharashtra recently approved the implementation of the STARS initiative, a USD 500-million project funded by the World Bank to improve the quality of learning in schools across six states in India: Himachal Pradesh, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Odisha and Rajasthan.
“The total cost of the project will be ₹976 crore, of which ₹390 crore will be given by the state government and ₹586 crore by the Central government,” said an official from the state education department.
What the STARS initiative covers
The World Bank’s board approved the loan behind the scheme on 24 June 2020. The money comes from the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development on a final maturity of 17.5 years, including a five-year grace period, and the bank expects the project to reach about 250 million students aged 6 to 17 in 1.5 million schools, along with more than 10 million teachers, according to the lender’s announcement.
The stated aims include stronger foundational learning in classes 1 to 3, an upgraded National Achievement Survey, support for India’s participation in the PISA assessments, needs-based teacher training and better secondary school completion rates. The bank notes that vulnerable groups make up over 52 per cent of children in government schools in the six participating states.
The Union Cabinet cleared the project on 14 October 2020 as a new centrally sponsored scheme of the Department of School Education and Literacy, with a total cost of Rs 5,718 crore, of which the World Bank provides about Rs 3,700 crore, according to the Prime Minister’s Office. At the national level the scheme finances better data systems on retention, transition and completion, state incentive grants linked to governance reforms, a national assessment centre named PARAKH, and a contingency component that can be triggered when schooling is disrupted. A parallel project funded by the Asian Development Bank covers five further states: Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Uttarakhand, Jharkhand and Assam.
At state level, the money is directed at early childhood education and foundational learning, learning assessment systems, classroom instruction and remediation through teacher development and school leadership, decentralised governance, and vocational education with career guidance and internships. Junaid Ahmad, then the World Bank’s country director in India, said at the approval that investing more in the early years of education would build the skills children need for future jobs, while Shabnam Sinha, the bank’s task team leader for the project, said STARS was designed to give states more flexibility in planning and budgeting for school education, with evidence-based planning and stronger accountability.
How the money and the work are split in Maharashtra
The STARS initiative will work on strengthening the pre-primary education system in Maharashtra with special emphasis on aanganwadis by providing them with quality infrastructure, training teachers etc.
Maharashtra state education department will implement the ‘Strengthening Teaching- Learning And Results for States’ (STARS) initiative in order to improve the overall teaching learning process in schools across the state. The implementation of the project will take place in a phased manner over the next five years.
The department will also set up an independent teacher training platform and will issue certifications after completion of training modules. There will also be efforts to, improve learning outcomes, reduce dropouts and extend counseling and guidance sessions to students.
The implementation of this program will come under Samagra Siksha Abhiyan. A seven-member committee will overlook the working of the initiative across districts in the state.
The ₹976 crore cited by the state education department is Maharashtra’s share of the national envelope, split 40:60 between the state and the Centre, and it sits alongside the state’s existing Samagra Shiksha spending rather than replacing it. Because the World Bank money is routed through the central scheme, Maharashtra’s drawdown depends on meeting the governance and assessment milestones that the STARS initiative attaches to its state incentive grants.
For Maharashtra’s schools, the sequencing matters. The February 2021 cabinet nod lets the education department begin the first year of a five-year rollout, with the aanganwadi upgrades and the independent teacher training platform among the earliest commitments, and the seven-member committee reporting on progress across districts. The World Bank’s project design also ties part of each state’s funding to improved accountability and inclusion for vulnerable groups, who make up more than half of government school enrolment in the six states, so the quality of learning agenda is paired with an equity one.
Since then: a national assessment centre takes shape
The most visible institution promised under the STARS initiative arrived two years later. PARAKH, the national assessment centre described in the Cabinet approval, was formally set up on 8 February 2023 by a notification of the National Council of Educational Research and Training, as an independent constituent unit of the council, according to its own charter. Its mandate, drawn from paragraph 4.4.1 of the National Education Policy 2020, is to set norms, standards and guidelines for student assessment across school boards.
The Cabinet’s 2020 release had already sketched that role, saying the centre would collect, curate and share state experiences through online portals, workshops and conferences. For the six STARS states, including Maharashtra, PARAKH is the body now shaping how the quality of learning is measured, from the National Achievement Survey to board examination reform, which gives the assessment strand of the 2021 state approval a longer afterlife than its infrastructure spending.
The centre’s first large field exercise, the PARAKH Rashtriya Sarvekshan, was conducted on 4 December 2024 and assessed about 21 lakh students in grades 3, 6 and 9 across more than 74,000 schools in 781 districts, with results compared against the National Achievement Surveys of 2017 and 2021. The exercise is the direct descendant of the assessment work that the STARS initiative was created to pay for, and the quality of learning data it produces will feed back into the state incentive grants that determine how much of the World Bank money each participating state can draw.
