Is the APAAR ID for students mandatory? | Explained

Students coming out of a government school at Governor Peta, Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh on March 15.
| Photo Credit: RAO G.N.

The story so far:

Activists and parents are worried about the rapid push by schools to generate an APAAR ID. APAAR is part of the National Education Policy (NEP), 2020’s record-keeping reforms, and while it is voluntary, States and school authorities have pushed students to enrol in it.

What is the APAAR ID?

APAAR stands for Automated Permanent Academic Account Registry. The registry enables what the government describes as the ‘One Nation, One Student ID’, in order to “accumulate and store [students’] academic accomplishments, facilitating seamless transitions between institutions for the pursuit of further education”. The APAAR ID is linked to Aadhaar and is stored in the DigiLocker. The registry provides students with standardised data on their marksheets and institutional affiliation. The system is touted as a way for different educational institutes to rapidly process and verify any given student’s academic transcripts. APAAR is generated through the Unified District Information System For Education Plus (UDISE+) portal, which contains regional academic statistics and data on schools, teachers and students.

The ID is a key aspect of NEP 2020’s mandate to overhaul education data collection for policymaking and analysis. The Education Ministry has been pushing schools affiliated with the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) to get “100% saturation” with respect to students registering for an APAAR ID.

Is APAAR mandatory?

APAAR is not mandatory, according to a document posted on the ID’s official site. However, circulars by the CBSE, and FAQ pages that have been published by the government, do not make this clear. The government has instead described the benefits of APAAR to students, such as permanently recording data on “transfer from one school to the other, entrance examination, admission, job application, skilling, upskilling,” and so on. While there is no law mandating its use, the CBSE and States like Uttar Pradesh have laid out expectations to schools, under their umbrella, that the ID should be issued to all students. Parents often do not receive any information which clearly spells out that the programme is voluntary. The Union government re-confirmed the optional nature of APAAR in response to a Parliament query in December 2024.

What about data security?

There is still a lack of clarity over the genesis of the APAAR programme. When the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) attempted to file a Right to Information application on its policy documents, the Union government transferred the advocacy’s application over 30 times, with no clear answer for months. “The datasets slated to be collected through APAAR enrolment are not limited to just educational certificates and grades, but spread far and wide,” the IFF wrote in 2023. Besides, the large-scale collection of data of minors without a law to back it up, the IFF argues, is unconstitutional. Moreover, teachers have questioned the need for APAAR, arguing that the data that APAAR collects is already collated by teachers for the UDISE+, thus duplicating a significant amount of administrative work in schools.

“Additionally, Section 9(3) of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 specifically prohibits “tracking or behavioural monitoring of children or targeted advertising directed at children” by entities,” the IFF points out. “Having open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and channels of data sharing without any robust safeguards, can expose children’s data to third parties who may use it for such purposes. Before it is rolled out, any such interfaces must be secured and legal safeguards put in place. There is an added responsibility on the APAAR framework to ensure cyber security, as the data being processed pertains to children..”.

How is an APAAR ID generated?

Teachers and schools are taking the lead in guiding parents to generate an APAAR ID for students. Schools verify a student’s “demographic details,” that is, their name and date of birth. Parents are then required to fill a consent form, and after another step of authentication by the school, the APAAR ID is generated. Some parents have flagged issues regarding the mismatch of names in school records and identity documents. “The user must correct the inaccurate data and resubmit their request to generate the APAAR ID”, an official document states.

Is there a way to opt out?

Parents have the option of writing to schools and opting out of generating the APAAR ID for children in their care. The Software Freedom Law Centre (SFLC) has provided a template on its website which parents, wishing to opt out of the scheme, can edit and send to their schools.

However, recent developments are increasing pressure on parents and school authorities at the local level to ensure APAAR generation. For instance, Uttar Pradesh has warned of “mismatch” between APAAR generation and school enrolment data, in spite of the voluntary nature of the programme, and threatened to de-recognise some madarassas that have not started the process. A digital rights advocate said that so far, parents have had success in persuading schools to opt out by providing relevant paperwork to show the voluntary nature of APAAR.