Education & Skill Development
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Education-and-skill schemes split cleanly into two lineages: school education (built around universal enrolment, retention, and quality, culminating in the merged "Samagra Shiksha" umbrella — see Renamed Schemes) and skilling/employability (built around certifying and upgrading a workforce that is disproportionately informally trained). The Ministry of Education runs the former; the Ministry of Skill Development & Entrepreneurship (created in 2014, itself a notable "new ministry" fact) runs the latter. Beti Bachao Beti Padhao sits at the intersection of education and the Women & Child Development ministry's child-sex-ratio mandate.
| Scheme | Year | Ministry | One-liner objective |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) | 2001 | Education | Universalise elementary education for all children aged 6–14 (now subsumed — see Renamed Schemes) |
| Mid-Day Meal Scheme (now PM POSHAN) | 1995 | Education | Free, nutritious cooked school meals to improve enrolment, retention, and nutrition |
| Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan (RMSA) | 2009 | Education | Universalise access to quality secondary education (now subsumed — see Renamed Schemes) |
| Beti Bachao Beti Padhao (BBBP) | 2015 | Women & Child Development (+ Education, Health) | Address declining child sex ratio and promote girls' education and survival |
| Pradhan Mantri Kaushal Vikas Yojana (PMKVY) | 2015 | Skill Development & Entrepreneurship | Short-term skill training and certification, with monetary reward for prior/newly acquired skills |
| Samagra Shiksha | 2018 | Education | Integrated umbrella scheme for school education from pre-school to Class 12 (merges SSA + RMSA + Teacher Education) |
| National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 implementation schemes | 2020 | Education | Structural reform of school (5+3+3+4) and higher-education architecture; foundational literacy focus |
| PM SHRI Schools | 2022 | Education | Upgrade select existing schools as exemplar "Schools for Rising India" showcasing NEP implementation |
| STARS Project (Strengthening Teaching-Learning and Results for States) | 2020 | Education | World Bank-supported project to improve learning outcomes and governance in select states |
| National Apprenticeship Promotion Scheme (NAPS) | 2016 | Skill Development & Entrepreneurship | Incentivise employers to engage apprentices and share training costs |
Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, launched in 2001, was independent India's flagship push for universal elementary education, running alongside the Right to Education Act (2009) that gave it a statutory backbone; RMSA, launched in 2009, extended the same universal-access logic to secondary schooling. Both were formally merged (along with Teacher Education schemes) into Samagra Shiksha in 2018 — treat this as the single most-tested "which schemes got merged into what" fact in this entire book, discussed further in the Renamed Schemes section below.
Beti Bachao Beti Padhao, launched on 22 January 2015 from Panipat, Haryana (a district then notorious for one of India's worst child sex ratios), is a three-ministry convergence scheme rather than a single-ministry one — nodal responsibility sits with Women & Child Development, but it works jointly with Health & Family Welfare (enforcement against sex-selective abortion, under the pre-existing PC-PNDT Act) and Education (retention of girls in school). PMKVY, under the National Skill Development Corporation, is the flagship scheme of the Skill India Mission (also launched in 2015) and is now in its fourth iteration (PMKVY 4.0), reflecting the scheme's periodic relaunch/revamp pattern that exams like to probe.
Memory hook — "SSA + RMSA + TE = Samagra": If a question mentions "elementary" or "secondary" education pre-2018, it's SSA or RMSA; if it mentions an integrated pre-school-to-Class-12 umbrella from 2018 onward, it's Samagra Shiksha — because that's exactly what swallowed the earlier two.
Practice Recall: Before reading on, name the three schemes merged to create Samagra Shiksha in 2018.
Answer: Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA, elementary education), Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan (RMSA, secondary education), and the Centrally Sponsored Scheme on Teacher Education.