The Administrative Data Standard (ADS) is India's open data standard for student achievement — from board exam scores to state-level athletics. Designed for 1.5 million schools, adoptable by any system, owned by no one.
38
Activities in taxonomy
2
Complementary standards
0
Existing alternatives
The Problem
India's education data infrastructure is extensive. It tracks enrollment, attendance, and exam marks across 26 crore students. Every major system — national and state — stops there. A student who wins a state-level athletics competition, debates at the national level, or performs at the Kerala Kalolsavam produces no structured, portable record of it in any government system.
| System | Covers | Missing |
|---|---|---|
| UDISE+ | School identity, enrollment, welfare scheme coverage, teacher counts | Achievement of any kind |
| APAAR / ABC | National student ID, higher education academic credits | Co-curricular records — aspirational in policy, unimplemented in practice |
| DigiLocker / NAD | Board certificates already issued by recognised institutions | Record generation — it stores what exists, cannot create what doesn't |
| SATS (Karnataka) | Enrollment, CCE academic results, transfer certificates, welfare | Extracurricular — the name "Achievement" is misleading |
| SARAL (Maharashtra) | 1.07 lakh schools, marksheets, dropout tracking, bank details | Extracurricular — no module exists or is documented |
| EMIS (Tamil Nadu) | Enrollment, academic performance, attendance, health screening | Extracurricular achievement |
| Sampoorna (Kerala) | Enrollment, exam scheduling, academic report generation | Extracurricular — despite Kerala having the world's largest school arts festival |
| VSK (Gujarat) | Real-time attendance, enrollment, teacher deployment — India's most advanced state system | Extracurricular — zero records even in the national model platform |
These systems collectively cover the vast majority of India's 26 crore enrolled students. The extracurricular gap is not a gap some states have solved. It is a structural absence across the entire country.
57.8%
of India's schools have fewer than 100 students — predominantly rural, government-run, and invisible to any existing achievement tracking system.
Source: UDISE+ 2024–25
89%
of single-teacher schools are in rural India. Their students' achievements produce no structured record anywhere — not because nothing happened, but because no system was built to capture it.
Source: Rural-Urban Education Inequality in India, The Samiksha
0
countries in the world have a production-grade open data standard for extracurricular student achievement at school level. The gap is not India-specific. It is global.
Source: Ed-Fi Data Standard; EdSurge open standards landscape 2025
The Standard
ADS is not a platform. It is a shared technical language — a specification that any school management system can implement, any government portal can adopt, and any university can read. It is designed to be the "railway tracks" rather than a single train.
Layer 1
The extracurricular data layer.
Defines how schools record and share activity participation, results, and achievement — from sports to arts to debate. Covers both the data model (for system builders) and an operations guide (for school administrators and teachers).
Layer 2
The government integration and credential portability layer.
Defines how academic records from India's existing education data infrastructure — UDISE+, APAAR, DigiLocker, and state EMIS systems — are mapped into a unified, portable student record without re-entry. Designed as the content layer for NDEAR's academic achievement building block.
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Both standards are works in progress, updated continuously as field experts, schools, and implementation experience contribute. The version published is the floor — not the ceiling. Contribute or subscribe to track changes as they land.
A common data language is more powerful than a single application.
Administrative Data Standard (ADS)
Centralised Application Portal
Design Principles
ADS is not just another data spec. Every decision — what to include, how to define it, how to structure it — should be tested against these seven principles. They exist to keep the standard honest.
The standard must work for a Class 6 student at a government school in rural Bihar as well as a national-level athlete in Bangalore. Every field, vocabulary term, and conduct guide must ask: does this leave anyone out?
The record belongs to the student. ADS exists to amplify their voice and open doors — not to create data assets for platforms or institutions. Ask of every contribution: does this serve the student, or does it serve the system?
Participation should not require equipment, infrastructure, or institutional resources. Every conduct guide must include a minimum viable path — how a school with no trained judges, no equipment, and limited connectivity can still run the activity and produce a valid record.
Every definition traces back to a recognized body — World Athletics, FIDE, Sangeet Natak Akademi, WSDC. Contributors document what already exists; they do not invent. Where no authoritative body exists, community proposals are welcome, but provenance must be stated.
Capture only what is needed for recognition and portability. Complexity is a barrier to adoption — especially in under-resourced schools. If a field cannot be justified by a downstream use (admissions, scholarship evaluation, talent discovery), it should not be in the standard.
Student data is protected by design, not by policy. Consent, pseudonymization, and data minimization are structural — not optional add-ons for implementations to configure later. The default is always the most privacy-preserving option.
Specialists define the ceiling: governing bodies set competition-grade definitions at the highest level of precision the standard can express. The community lowers the floor: adapting those definitions so a school with no specialist coaches or equipment can still participate and have that participation recorded meaningfully. Both directions are equally valid contributions.
Activity Taxonomy v0.1
Every activity name and classification value is traced to an authoritative institutional source. No guesswork about what counts or how it's categorised. Click any activity to see its data schema and standard details.
Style: Classical · Rapid · Blitz · Bullet
↳ Student IP rights apply
Dance styles: Bharatanatyam · Kathak · Kuchipudi · Odissi · Manipuri · Mohiniyattam · Kathakali · Sattriya
Data Model
Each activity log entry captures what happened, how it happened, and where the student placed — in a structured, machine-readable format that any receiving institution can parse.
| Field | Type | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| activity_id | string | References taxonomy — Domain / Category / Activity |
| ads_version | string | Version of this standard at time of entry |
| participation_format | enum | Solo · Pair · Team · Group |
| style | string | Per-activity controlled vocabulary (e.g. Mohiniyattam, Blitz Chess); null where not applicable |
| date | date | Date of event (ISO 8601) |
| result_type | enum | Judge-Scored · Performance-Metric · Match-Result |
| outcome | enum | Winner · Runner-Up · 3rd Place · Merit · Participated · Withdrew · Disqualified |
| metric_value | decimal | For measurable events (time, distance, weight); null otherwise |
| metric_unit | string | seconds · metres · kg — ISO 80000-series where applicable |
| level | enum | School · District · State · National · International |
| work_title | string | For authored works only (essay, poem, painting) |
| work_license | enum | CC_BY_NC · CC_BY_NC_SA · CC_BY · All_Rights_Reserved; null for non-authored activities |
APAAR is a trophy cabinet. ADS is a training diary. These are not competing for the same shelf.
Policy Context
"There should be no hard separation among 'curricular', 'extracurricular', or 'co-curricular' activities."
The Ministry of Education has defined what should be recorded. It has provided no specification for how — no data standard, no common format, no collection mechanism, no interoperability requirement. ADS fills that vacuum in a form — open standard — that government can adopt, mandate, or co-brand without creating vendor lock-in.
Every state education department that wants to comply with the NEP HPC mandate currently has no government-provided alternative for digital implementation. ADS is additive to their existing systems, not a replacement — the precise opposite of the friction APAAR faces from states like Karnataka.
Stakeholders
Log what you already know happened. ADS gives structure to the record without adding administrative overhead. The same tool works for an inter-house cricket match and a national-level athletics selection.
Extend your SATS, SARAL, or EMIS with the one data layer it was never built to generate. ADS is additive — it does not ask you to replace what you already have. It gives you what none of your systems captures.
A common format means you can ask for ADS-formatted achievement records and receive them from any adopting school — regardless of their management software, state, or board affiliation.
An open standard removes the need to build bespoke integrations with each school's own format. Build once for ADS; reach every school that adopts it. Scholarship aggregators, discovery tools, and guidance platforms all become possible.
Global Alignment
Both standards are designed to directly advance multiple UN Sustainable Development Goals related to education equity, inclusion, and global knowledge cooperation.
| SDG | Target | How ADS advances it |
|---|---|---|
| 4.1 | Free, equitable, quality primary and secondary education | Standard is free and open; no vendor dependency required for adoption by any school at any resource level |
| 4.5 | Eliminate disparities in access to education | Makes extracurricular achievement visible for rural and government school students who produce no formal certificates; Aadhaar-independent |
| 4.7 | Education for sustainable development and global citizenship | CC licensing for student work builds IPR literacy at school level from the point of creation |
| 10.2 | Social, economic, and political inclusion regardless of background | Surfaces achievement regardless of school type, geography, certificate access, or Aadhaar coverage |
| 17.6 | Technology cooperation and knowledge sharing | Open standard designed for cross-institution, cross-state, and cross-border interoperability; NDEAR-compatible |
Governance
The ADS Initiative is stewarded by the Beamer project — a school achievement platform and the reference implementation for both standards. Beamer is the implementing platform; ADS is the standard. The standard is designed to outlive any single organisation.
Both repositories are published under Apache 2.0 — the licence chosen specifically because it includes an explicit patent grant, removing the most common legal blocker for adoption by government bodies, universities, and corporations.
Apache 2.0 licence
Chosen over MIT specifically for the explicit patent grant — required by government and institutional legal teams for adoption without IP exposure. See DECISIONS.md (DEC-003 / DEC-006) for full rationale.
Taxonomy review cycle
Activity additions are reviewed on a 6-month cycle aligned to academic years. Proposals between cycles are tracked in GitHub Issues and merged at the next review.
Vendor-neutral by design
The Beamer platform has no privileged status over any other adopter. Any school management system, EMIS, or government portal can implement ADS without any reference to Beamer.
Two standards under active development. Contributions welcome from education administrators, sport federation representatives, PE teachers, cultural educators, policy researchers, schema developers, and anyone who has organised a school event.
You're a PE teacher, Carnatic music educator, SGFI-affiliated official, or debate coach. Open an Issue or Discussion describing what should change. No GitHub workflow needed.
Fork, branch, pull request. Include Signed-off-by in commits (Developer Certificate of Origin). Open an issue before non-trivial changes.
Working in a state education department, university admissions office, or scholarship body? Talk to us about what an ADS implementation would look like for your institution.