ADS is India's open specification for student achievement — defining how every event is recorded, what fields it contains, and how data flows between schools, universities, and regulatory bodies. Built to bring structural order to the system and make a step-change in data interoperability, talent visibility, and efficiency on all sides.
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. Without a shared standard for this layer, achievement records cannot be machine-readable, consistent, or portable across institutions.
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.
Data Interoperability
A primary goal of ADS is to significantly improve data interoperability within India's higher-education ecosystem and the institutions that rely on its outputs. Every school and university-level event — academic or non-academic — should produce a structured, machine-readable record that any downstream system can consume without manual reinterpretation: admissions portals, scholarship platforms, APAAR, state EMIS, or university systems. ADS defines that record.
Source of Truth
ADS resolves source-of-truth problems that accumulate without a shared vocabulary: inconsistent field definitions across application forms, incompatible data-capture formats for identical event types, and records that cannot be matched against the data vocabularies maintained by the regulatory bodies governing those events. Every term in the standard traces to a recognised authority — ensuring that what one system calls an event, every system calls the same thing.
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
Two standards under active development. Contributions welcome from educators, sport federation representatives, cultural practitioners, schema developers, and anyone who has organised a school event.
The Standards Development Committee is the governance body responsible for ratifying vocabulary changes, approving new activity domains, and maintaining the integrity of the standard over time. It has a three-tier structure: a Governing Board, Domain Working Groups, and a Technical Council.
View the SDC pageYou'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.