Before 2024, there was no single, standardized plan guiding what an Anganwadi worker in Assam or Andhra Pradesh should do with a three-year-old on a Tuesday morning. That gap is now addressed. The Adharshila National Curriculum for Early Childhood Care and Education 2024, released by the Ministry of Women and Child Development (MWCD), provides India’s Anganwadi workers with exactly that – a detailed, week-by-week, day-by-day plan for educating children aged three to six. The word Adharshila means “foundation stone,” and that is precisely what this curriculum is designed to be: the bedrock of a child’s lifelong learning journey.
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What is the Adharshila curriculum?
Adharshila is India’s first national curriculum specifically designed for the preschool years within the Anganwadi system. Released in March 2024 by the MWCD, it is a 48-week structured curriculum targeting children between three and six years of age, across India’s approximately 13.9 lakh Anganwadi Centres serving over 8 crore children under six. It was developed by the National Institute of Public Cooperation and Child Development (NIPCCD), incorporating feedback from Anganwadi workers themselves to keep it visual, practical, and low on text-heavy instructions.
The curriculum is aligned with two major national policy frameworks: the National Education Policy 2020 and the National Curriculum Framework for Foundational Stage 2022 (NCF-FS). It covers all key domains of child development – physical and motor, cognitive, language and literacy, socioemotional, and cultural/aesthetic – along with the building of positive habits. The underlying pedagogy is firmly play-based and joy-centred, recognising that meaningful learning in early childhood happens through doing, not rote repetition.
The 4 + 36 + 8 week structure
The most defining feature of Adharshila is its carefully sequenced annual plan. As the PIB press release confirms, the curriculum is formally divided into 4 weeks of initiation, 36 weeks of active learning, and 8 weeks of recap and reinforcement – a structure that mirrors how young children naturally adapt, learn, and consolidate new skills.
4 weeks of initiation
The first four weeks are not about teaching – they are about settling in. Many children arriving at an Anganwadi centre for the first time have spent their entire lives at home. The initiation phase gives them time to get familiar with the physical space, meet peers, understand basic routines, and begin feeling safe. Activities during this phase centre on free play, gentle social interaction, and exploration. There is no pressure to achieve academic milestones. The goal is simple: help the child feel that the Anganwadi is a place they belong.
This transition period reflects a sound understanding of child psychology. Forcing structured learning on a child who is still anxious about the environment is counterproductive. By investing four weeks in making the child comfortable, Adharshila ensures that the 36 weeks of active learning that follow are built on a foundation of trust and familiarity.
36 weeks of active learning
This is the core of the curriculum. Across 36 weeks, Anganwadi workers follow a structured weekly play-based calendar that includes exploration, free play, guided conversation, creation, appreciation, and reflection. Each week has specific activities aligned to learning outcomes across all developmental domains. The day itself is divided into three blocks of activities, combining five days of structured learning with one day reserved for community-based and home learning activities.
Activities include storytelling, rhymes, art and craft, observation exercises, sorting games, pre-numeracy tasks, emergent literacy activities, and outdoor play. Importantly, each activity is designed to serve multiple developmental purposes at once. A storytelling session, for instance, simultaneously develops language comprehension, listening attention, sequencing skills, and social imagination. The curriculum does not treat domains in isolation – it mirrors how a child’s development actually works.
Each week and day within this phase includes mindfully detailed, day-wise activities that show Anganwadi workers exactly when and how new learning can be introduced, revisited, and deepened. This spiralling approach – where concepts are introduced, then returned to at greater depth – is a hallmark of quality curriculum design, and Adharshila brings it to the Anganwadi level in a form that is genuinely accessible to its frontline implementers.
8 weeks of reinforcement
The eight weeks of reinforcement are distributed across the academic year rather than placed only at the end. Specifically, four weeks of recap are recommended after the first 18 weeks of active learning, with the remaining four weeks used later in the cycle. This placement is deliberate. Young children need time to absorb and consolidate skills before new learning is introduced. By building reinforcement phases into the rhythm of the year, the curriculum prevents common problems like surface-level learning that fades quickly or gaps that compound over time.
During reinforcement weeks, Anganwadi workers revisit activities, observe individual children more closely, and provide additional support where needed. These weeks also serve as an informal assessment opportunity – helping workers identify which children are progressing well and which may need more targeted attention before the next active learning phase begins.
Competency-based lesson plans
What makes Adharshila practically useful is its commitment to competency-based lesson planning. According to the Ministry of Women and Child Development, the curriculum prioritises competency-based lesson plans with almost 150 activities that cover all learning domains. Rather than listing abstract educational goals, each lesson plan specifies concrete competencies a child should be developing – and then describes exact activities through which those competencies are built.
This is a significant shift from earlier approaches in many Anganwadis, where activities were often informal, inconsistent, or guided purely by individual worker intuition. With Adharshila, an Anganwadi worker in any part of the country now has a clear “view and do” guidebook – with illustrations, simple language, and step-by-step instructions for each activity. The curriculum was deliberately designed with minimal text and maximum visual guidance, directly in response to feedback from frontline workers during its development.
Each lesson plan also includes robust assessment tools for tracking individual child progress. These tools help workers tailor activities based on what each child needs, celebrate developmental milestones, and flag children who may require referral for additional support. Assessment here is not about grading or ranking – it is about understanding where each child is on their developmental journey and adjusting accordingly.
The curriculum also provides flexibility for states to adapt activities to local cultural contexts. A child in a tribal area of Jharkhand and a child in an urban centre in Karnataka are both working toward the same competencies – but the materials, stories, and examples used can and should reflect their immediate surroundings. This balance between standardisation and local relevance is one of Adharshila’s key design strengths.
Inclusive design: every child, every activity
Perhaps the most significant aspect of Adharshila, from a child rights and disability perspective, is its explicit and structured approach to inclusion. The curriculum does not treat inclusion as an add-on or a separate chapter – it integrates inclusion into the core of every activity.
As the official PIB launch statement confirms, special focus has been given for the screening, inclusion, and referrals of Divyang children in every activity. This means that for each of the nearly 150 activities in the curriculum, the lesson plan includes specific guidance on how to adapt that activity for a child with a physical, sensory, cognitive, or developmental disability. Inclusion is not left to the individual worker’s judgement – it is built into the instructional design itself.
This matters enormously in the Indian context. Research in the field has consistently highlighted the reality that children with disabilities are among the most likely to be absent from Anganwadis altogether. As noted by Dr. Monimalika Day, an expert in ECCE and special education at Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University Delhi, the World Health Organization estimates that around 15% of any population has some form of disability – a figure that rises further in areas with high rates of malnutrition or limited healthcare access. Yet in many Anganwadis, children with disabilities simply do not appear. Adharshila directly challenges this exclusion by making their participation a built-in expectation, not an afterthought.
The UNICEF-supported ECCE approach in India has similarly shown that when Anganwadi workers are trained to include children with disabilities actively – adapting activities, building comfort, and engaging families – the outcomes are transformative. Children who might otherwise have stayed home begin participating, socialising, and developing confidence alongside their peers.
Screening and referral as part of the system
Inclusion in Adharshila goes beyond classroom adaptation. The curriculum also builds in a systematic screening and referral process for Divyang children. Anganwadi workers are guided to observe children for signs of developmental delays or disabilities during their regular activities, and the curriculum provides clear pathways for referring children who may need further assessment or specialist support.
This is supported by a two-tier training model implemented through NIPCCD, which includes three days of focused training for Anganwadi workers covering curriculum delivery, pedagogy, and assessment tools, with an emphasis on play-based and activity-based approaches. Workers are trained to recognise signs of major disability types – physical-motor, visual, hearing, and intellectual – and to understand why early referral and timely intervention are critical for a child’s developmental trajectory.
Monthly ECCE days and DIY toy-making workshops further extend community engagement, helping families of children with disabilities understand how home-based activities can reinforce what happens at the centre. This continuum – from centre to home, from worker to family – is central to how Adharshila envisions inclusion functioning in practice.
Why Adharshila represents a structural shift
India has long recognised the importance of early childhood education in principle. The NEP 2020 explicitly states that 85% of brain development occurs before the age of six – making the Anganwadi years among the most critical in a child’s life. Yet until Adharshila, there was no nationally standardised curriculum guiding what actually happened in those centres on a day-to-day basis. The result was significant variation in quality, with outcomes dependent largely on the individual worker’s skills, experience, and available resources.
Adharshila changes that structural gap. By providing a detailed, day-wise, play-based, inclusivity-embedded, competency-driven curriculum to every Anganwadi centre in the country, it creates a floor of quality that did not previously exist. It also positions Anganwadi workers not just as caregivers but as early educators – professionals with a structured methodology, clear learning goals, and a system of support behind them.
The NIPCCD, which led the curriculum’s development and will anchor its national training rollout, has also ensured that the curriculum’s weekly activity schedules, home visit guidance, and assessment tools are incorporated into the Poshan Tracker – the digital platform used to monitor child development data across Anganwadis. This integration means that implementation can be monitored, supported, and improved at scale.
For children with disabilities specifically, Adharshila marks the first time that a national curriculum has formally embedded their inclusion – not as a policy aspiration, but as a practical, activity-level mandate. For Anganwadi workers who previously had no guidance on how to include a child with a visual impairment in a storytelling session, or how to support a child with motor difficulties during an art activity, the curriculum now provides concrete answers.
What do you think? Given that Anganwadi workers are frontline educators managing large groups with limited resources, what kinds of ongoing support – beyond initial training – would make inclusive implementation of Adharshila most effective? And how might communities, particularly families of children with disabilities, be more meaningfully involved in this process?
References
- https://www.wcd.gov.in/offerings/early-childhood-care-and-education
- https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleaseIframePage.aspx?PRID=2013429
- https://www.education.gov.in/sites/upload_files/mhrd/files/NEP_Final_English_0.pdf
- https://samuhikpahal.org/interviews/promoting-inclusion-in-ecce-challenges-strategies-and-pathways-to-develop-inclusive-classrooms/
- https://drgeetachopra.com/ecea/
- https://www.nipccd.nic.in/publications-Early
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