PARAKH: India’s New National Assessment Body Explained
Exams have long been the most feared and most criticised part of Indian schooling — feared by students, criticised by educators for rewarding memorisation over understanding. NEP 2020 set out to fix this by creating a new national body dedicated entirely to rethinking assessment: PARAKH.
What Is PARAKH?
PARAKH stands for Performance Assessment, Review, and Analysis of Knowledge for Holistic Development. It’s a national body set up under NEP 2020 with a single mandate: shift Indian assessment away from rote recall and toward measuring real understanding, application, and holistic development.
Rather than replacing existing school boards, PARAKH is designed to work alongside them — setting guidelines, benchmarks, and sample assessment frameworks that state boards and CBSE can adopt, so the shift toward competency-based testing happens across the country rather than in isolated pockets.
What Changes in Practice
Holistic report cards. Instead of a single mark sheet dominated by exam scores, the push is toward report cards that reflect a broader picture — participation, projects, skill development, and behavioural growth alongside academic performance.
Competency-based question design. Question papers are gradually shifting toward asking students to apply a concept in an unfamiliar context, rather than reproduce a memorised answer. In my own English and Science classes, this shows up as more comprehension-based and reasoning-based questions rather than straightforward “define” or “list” questions.
Reduced high-stakes pressure at single points. NEP’s broader vision includes multiple assessment points through the year rather than concentrating everything into one make-or-break board exam, though this is one of the slower-moving reforms since it requires boards to redesign entire exam calendars.
Why Teachers Should Pay Attention Now
For teachers, PARAKH’s direction matters more than its exact institutional structure. If assessment is genuinely shifting toward competency and application, then classroom teaching has to shift with it — spending time on skills like comprehension, reasoning, and problem application rather than only content coverage and drilling for recall.
It’s also worth being realistic: reform bodies like PARAKH set direction, but actual exam papers are still designed and administered by CBSE, state boards, and individual schools. The pace of change will vary depending on how quickly each of those bodies aligns their own question papers and marking schemes with PARAKH’s recommendations.
The Bigger Picture
PARAKH represents something India’s education system has needed for a long time: a dedicated institutional voice arguing for assessment reform rather than leaving it to individual board committees. Whether it succeeds in genuinely changing how a Class 9 exam paper looks five years from now will depend on how much authority and follow-through it’s given — a question that, like much of NEP’s implementation, is still being answered.