In the forest-fringed Toto settlements of Alipurduar and the scattered Birhor hamlets of Purulia, the report cards often tell a reassuring story. Children move from one class to the next every year, enrolment remains steady, and schools appear to be fulfilling the constitutional promise of universal education. But inside the classrooms, a harsher reality unfolds. Many students in Classes VI and VII struggle to read a Class II-level passage or solve elementary arithmetic, exposing a silent learning crisis that experts say was deepened by the implementation of the Right to Education (RTE) Act’s now-diluted nodetention policy.

What was conceived as a progressive reform to eliminate the fear of failure has, in some of India’s most disadvantaged communities, evolved into what education researchers describe as “promotion without proficiency”— a system that has succeeded in keeping children in school but often failed to ensure that they actually learn. The no-detention provision, introduced under the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act in 2010, prohibited schools from failing students until the completion of elementary education. The objective was to reduce dropouts, curb examination anxiety and make schools more child-friendly. While the policy improved retention on paper, its implementation gradually exposed a widening disconnect between enrolment and learning outcomes.

The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2022 offered a sobering snapshot of this crisis. Nationally, only 42.8 per cent of Class V students could read a Class II-level text, while just 25.6 per cent could correctly solve a simple division problem. Educationists believe the situation is considerably more severe in geographically isolated tribal regions, where schools contend with teacher shortages, multigrade classrooms, language barriers and chronic absenteeism. Among West Bengal’s Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTGs), these structural disadvantages have accumulated over years. For the Toto community in Totopara and the Birhor settlements spread across Purulia’s forested landscape, education begins with multiple handicaps.

Many children enter schools where the language of instruction differs from the language spoken at home. One teacher is often responsible for teaching several classes simultaneously. Seasonal migration, forest-based livelihoods and poor transport infrastructure interrupt schooling for weeks at a stretch. Under the earlier no-detention regime, however, these interruptions rarely translated into academic intervention. Students continued to advance with their age cohort regardless of whether they had acquired foundational literacy or numeracy.

According to anthropologist Dr Santanu Panda, faculty member of the Department of Anthropology at Sukumar Sengupta Mahavidyalaya,........

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