The Administrative Data Standard is India's open data standard for student achievement — across sports, arts, debate, and research. Owned by no one. Adoptable by anyone.
The Problem
UDISE+, APAAR, DigiLocker, and six state EMIS systems together track 26 crore students. None of them record extracurricular achievement. This isn't a flaw in their design — it's a boundary that has never been drawn across, at any level, in any system.
open data standards
exist for this layer.
Not in Ed-Fi, 1EdTech, NDEAR, or any comparable body.
| System | What it covers | What it doesn't |
|---|---|---|
| UDISE+ | School identity, enrollment, welfare scheme coverage, teacher counts | Student achievement — outside its administrative brief |
| APAAR / ABC | National student ID, higher education credits | Co-curricular records — referenced in policy, not yet implemented in the published spec |
| DigiLocker / NAD | Board certificates issued by recognised institutions | Record generation — designed to store credentials that already exist, not originate new ones |
| SATS (Karnataka) | Enrollment, CCE academic results, transfer certificates | Extracurricular achievement |
| SARAL (Maharashtra) | 1.07 lakh schools, marksheets, dropout tracking | Extracurricular achievement |
| EMIS (Tamil Nadu) | Enrollment, academic performance, attendance | Extracurricular achievement |
| Sampoorna (Kerala) | Enrollment, exam scheduling, academic report generation | Extracurricular — including from Kalolsavam, one of India's most extensive school competition programmes |
| VSK (Gujarat) | Real-time attendance, enrollment, teacher deployment | Extracurricular achievement |
Based on publicly available documentation. Not a criticism — each was built to solve a different problem.
The Standard
ADS is not a platform. It is a specification — a common technical language that any school system can implement, any government portal can adopt, and any university can read.
Defines how schools record sports, arts, and debate results — with controlled vocabularies traced to World Athletics, FIDE, Sangeet Natak Akademi, and other governing bodies.
Maps records from UDISE+, APAAR, DigiLocker, and state EMIS systems into portable W3C Verifiable Credentials. Designed as the content layer for NDEAR's academic achievement building block.
NEP 2020 Section 4.36 mandates Holistic Progress Cards that include extracurricular achievement for every student. No government-provided technical specification exists for how to do this. ADS is that specification.
Open Standard (ADS)
Centralised Portal
Design Principles
Click any principle to read the full definition.
Activity Taxonomy v0.1
Every activity name, classification, and result type is traced to an authoritative institutional source. No ambiguity about what counts or how it's categorised.
31
Sport
T&F · Team · Racket · Mind
10
Cultural
Debate · Literary · Arts
3
Research
Conduct guide soon
—
Civic
In development
Style: Classical · Rapid · Blitz · Bullet
↳ Student IP rights apply
Interactive Tool
The ADS weight system scores every achievement against three dimensions — reach, rigor, and outcome. Try it with Kalolsavam, SGFI, Mood Indigo, or any competition you know.
Two standards under active development. Contributions welcome from educators, sport federation representatives, cultural practitioners, schema developers, and anyone who has organised a school event.
You're a PE teacher, Carnatic educator, SGFI official, or debate coach. Open an Issue or Discussion on GitHub. No prior technical workflow needed.
Fork, branch, pull request. Include Signed-off-by in commits. Open an issue before non-trivial changes so we can align first.