Maths in India
The State of Mathematics in India: From Heritage to Crisis
The nation that gave the world zero now scores 37% in Grade 9 maths. What PARAKH and ASER reveal — and where we lost our way.
MM
Manish Manjul
Founder–General Secretary, Samarth 15 April 2026 · 8 min read
Part One: The Heritage
There was a time when mathematics was spoken in Sanskrit.
Close your eyes. Picture India twenty-eight centuries ago. Somewhere in a forest of northern India, a Vedic scholar sits — Baudhayan.
He is building a fire altar. Not by guessing, but with precise measurement. He writes down a rule: the diagonal of a rectangle produces a square equal to the sum of the squares formed by its length and breadth. Every school child today knows this as the Pythagorean Theorem. But Baudhayan wrote it eight hundred years before Pythagoras.
He was not writing a textbook. He was performing a prayer. For him, mathematics was not a classroom subject — it was woven into life itself — into worship, into construction, into every act of devotion.
What followed Baudhayan changed the world.
In the fifth century, sitting in Kusumpur — today’s Patna — Aryabhata did what no human being had ever done before. He gave meaning to ‘nothing.’ He declared: the absence of a number is itself a number. The world would call it zero. Think about that for a moment. Without zero, you cannot write ten. Without ten, no arithmetic. Without arithmetic, no algebra. Without algebra, no physics. Without physics, no bridges, no rockets, no phones. The device you are reading this on exists because an ancient Indian decided that ‘nothing’ is something.
In the sixth century, Varahamihira of Ujjain mapped the mathematical motion of planets. His Panchasiddhantika unified five astronomical systems into one. But his most remarkable contribution was to Combinatorics — he discovered how to count the possible arrangements of things. The triangular table he created for this purpose would be ‘discovered’ by Europe a thousand years later and called ‘Pascal’s Triangle.’ It should be called Varahamihira’s Triangle.
In the seventh century, Brahmagupta of Rajasthan wrote the rules for addition, subtraction, and multiplication with negative numbers and zero. It seems simple today. But it took Europe another eight hundred years to understand negative numbers.
Eight hundred years.
In the ninth century, the Jain scholar Mahavira wrote the world’s first book devoted entirely to mathematics — Ganita Sara Sangraha. Before this, mathematics had always been a chapter in astronomy books. Mahavira set it free. He made mathematics a subject in its own right.
In the twelfth century, Bhaskara II (Bhaskaracharya) discovered in his Lilavati and Siddhanta Shiromani how to calculate the instantaneous rate of change of anything. The world calls this calculus. Newton and Leibniz did the same thing five hundred years later and claimed all the credit.
In the fourteenth century, Madhava of Kerala discovered the infinite series for sine, cosine, and arctangent — the foundational tools of modern mathematics. Three hundred years later, Leibniz, Newton, Taylor, and Maclaurin arrived at the same place independently, never knowing that a man from Kerala had reached there long before them.
And then came Srinivasa Ramanujan — a boy from Kumbakonam, Tamil Nadu, with no formal training, no professor, no laboratory. Just a notebook and an extraordinary mind. His theorems still astonish mathematicians a hundred years later. The British system that finally recognised him had nearly overlooked him completely. He did not emerge from some great institution. He emerged despite the absence of one.
This is our heritage. From Baudhayan’s geometry to Aryabhata’s zero, from Varahamihira’s combinatorics to Brahmagupta’s algebra, from Mahavira’s computation to Bhaskara’s calculus, from Madhava’s infinite series to Ramanujan’s partitions — an unbroken chain of genius spanning two thousand years.
In my previous article, I described this heritage as the foundation of Samarth Trust’s vision — the vision of ‘Paraspar-Nirbharta’ (interdependence), where a nation’s strength flows from the potential of every single child. I spoke of the ‘Well and Bucket’ philosophy — a teacher descending to the student’s level to lift them up. I discussed the possibility of solving 120 questions in 4 minutes, not through speed, but through deep understanding.
But heritage alone does not teach children. We must look at what is happening today. And what is happening today — as measured by the two largest educational assessments this country has ever conducted — will break your heart.
Part Two: The Truth in Numbers — What PARAKH and ASER Reveal
1. The Staircase of Decline: PARAKH 2024
In December 2024, the Government of India did something that had never been done before. PARAKH — an institution under NCERT — tested students across 74,229 schools, in 781 districts, covering 21 lakh 15 thousand students. Every state. Every union territory. No sampling — a complete national portrait.
The question was simple: how well do our children actually know mathematics?
The answer was deeply alarming.
In Grade 3, the average mathematics score is 60 per cent. That means 4 out of every 10 children at age 8 cannot do what is expected of them. Only half understand what multiplication and division even mean.
By Grade 6, this drops to 46 per cent. Mathematics is now the weakest subject. And here is the number that should frighten you: only 29 per cent. Fewer than 3 in 10 children understand fractions. Fractions are not some advanced topic. Fractions are the gateway to algebra. If you cannot walk through that door, you cannot go further. And seven out of ten children are standing outside that door — locked out.
By Grade 9, mathematics falls to 37 per cent — the lowest score for any subject, in any grade, across the entire country.
Pause and absorb these numbers. In Grade 9, only 28 per cent of students understand percentages. Only 29 per cent can construct a logical argument. Only 38 per cent can do algebra.
What does this mean in real life? The next time your child goes to take an education loan and has to sign a document with an interest rate, there is a 72 per cent chance they will not be able to calculate how much they will have to repay. The next time a graph appears in a newspaper, there is a 71 per cent chance they will not be able to read it.
60 to 46, and then 37 — this is not a slow decline. This is a building crumbling. Mathematics is like a structure — every floor rests on the one below. If the foundation shakes, cracks appear on every level above. By Grade 9, those cracks have produced a building that can barely stand.
2. A Ray of Hope: ASER 2024
But in this darkness, there is a small lamp.
In January 2025, ASER (Annual Status of Education Report) released the results of its massive survey. It tested 6 lakh 49 thousand children across 605 rural districts. What emerged was unexpected.
For the first time in over a decade, basic arithmetic in rural India is improving.
In Grade 3, the proportion of children who can do subtraction rose from 25.9 per cent in 2022 to 33.7 per cent in 2024. In Grade 5, the proportion who could successfully perform division increased from 25.6 to 30.7 per cent. The most surprising finding? Government schools are leading this recovery. In Grade 3, government schools made a 7.4-percentage-point leap, while private schools gained only 4.4 percentage points.
This is likely the impact of NIPUN Bharat and the National Education Policy 2020 — the first time India ran a serious national campaign on Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN).
But there is a darker side to this ‘success.’ 33.7 per cent means that two out of every three children in rural India still cannot do subtraction. If 70 per cent of Grade 5 children cannot divide, how will they be ready for fractions in Grade 6? PARAKH’s data tells us exactly where they end up — failing.
ASER shows that the foundation can be repaired. But PARAKH proves that the building standing on that foundation is still collapsing. The foundation is getting slightly stronger. But the house is still falling apart.
Part Three: Classrooms Where ‘Understanding’ Is Dying
Let me give you an example. No statistics this time. Just the story of a child.
Priya is in Grade 8. She goes to a government school in a small town in Madhya Pradesh. She is a good student. Her parents are proud of her. Last year she scored 91 marks in mathematics. Ninety-one. Her mother got the marksheet framed and hung it on the wall.
One evening, Priya’s father takes her to the neighbourhood kirana shop. He buys 3 kilos of rice at ₹52 per kilo and half a kilo of dal at ₹140 per kilo. He turns to his daughter — the same daughter who scored 91 in maths — and asks: “How much is the total?”
Priya goes blank.
She reaches for her phone. Her father stops her. “No phone. Use your brain.”
She cannot answer.
She knows how to solve 3x + 7 = 22. She can recite the formula for the area of a trapezium. But standing in a real shop, with real rice and real dal and real money in front of her, she has no idea what to do.
Her father, who studied only up to Grade 5, had already done the calculation in his head. Rice: ₹156. Dal: ₹70. Total: ₹226. He didn’t need any mathematical formula. He understood numbers. His daughter had memorised them.
This is not Priya’s failure. This is the failure of a system.
Across India, in lakhs of classrooms, the same ritual is repeated every day. The teacher writes a problem on the board. Children copy the step-by-step method. Ten times, twenty times, fifty times they practise. In exams, they repeat those same steps. They score good marks. Everyone is happy. The child moves to the next grade. The school reports a pass rate. The government announces improved results.
But no one — not the teacher, not the parents, not the system — asks the child: “Do you actually understand what you just did? Can you explain it in your own words? Can you use it outside this classroom?”
Because the system does not reward understanding. It rewards copying. Write the steps. Score the marks. Move on.
I call this the ‘Well and Bucket’ problem. In my first article, I wrote that a true teacher must descend into the well where the child is struggling, reach down to their level, understand their confusion, and then slowly pull them up. But our system tells the teacher: don’t go down. Just throw a rope from above. If the child grabs it, fine. If not, move on. There’s a long queue waiting.
The result? A 2024 survey found that 82 per cent of students in Grades 7 to 10 suffer from Mathematical Anxiety. Not difficulty, anxiety. The fear of mathematics runs so deep inside them that the moment they see an unfamiliar problem, their minds go blank. Because they were never taught to think. They were only taught to repeat.
And when thinking becomes necessary, in the Grade 10 board exams, where questions change every year, the rope snaps. In 2022, 35 lakh students in Grade 10 either failed or dropped out before reaching Grade 11. Thirty-five lakh. These were not unintelligent children. These were children who had been scoring good marks for nine years.
The system told them they understood. The exam told them they did not.
Priya, standing in that shop, was unable to add up the price of rice. She is not alone. She is in India. She is 37 per cent.
Part Four: The Geography of Inequality
This crisis does not affect all children equally. It follows the oldest fault lines of our society.
Imagine two children, both born on the same day in 2015. One in Sangrur, Punjab. The other in Shi Yomi, Arunachal Pradesh. Both Indian citizens. Both with equal constitutional rights. Both entitled to the same quality of education.
By Grade 9, the child from Sangrur will be among the top performers in mathematics in the country. The child from Shi Yomi will be among the weakest. Not because one is more intelligent. But because one was born in the right place.
By social category: In Grade 3, Scheduled Tribe children (57 per cent) and ‘Other’ category children (61 per cent) both pass. The gap is just 4 percentage points — manageable. By Grade 9, the gap widens dramatically. Scheduled Tribe children fall to 32 per cent, and ‘Others’ to 40. The gap has doubled. For Scheduled Caste children, the decline is even steeper: from 60 per cent in Grade 3 to 35 per cent in Grade 9 — a 25-point drop in six years.
The system is not just failing. It is failing unequally.
By school type: A Kendriya Vidyalaya child scores 48 per cent in Grade 9 mathematics, while a private school child scores 44 per cent. A state government school child, where the vast majority of India’s children study, scores just 33 per cent. A fifteen-point gap between the best and the rest. One country, one curriculum, but entirely different worlds.
By location, Urban children score 38 per cent while rural children score 36 per cent. The gap is small. And that is the most frightening part. It means this crisis is not confined to villages. It is everywhere.
By gender: Boys score 37 per cent, girls 36 per cent. The gap is negligible. Mathematical failure does not discriminate by gender. It is an equal-opportunity disaster.
But amid this darkness, some district-level data surprises. Sidhi (Madhya Pradesh), Dholpur (Rajasthan), Jangaon (Telangana) — districts that no one talks about, yet they rank in the top 50 nationally. These are districts with no special advantages. Which means: if they can do it, anyone can. Geography is not destiny. The system works. But for most children, their temperament is hostile.
Part Five: The World Has Not Stopped
While we struggle, the world is racing ahead.
Singapore’s students score 575 in PISA mathematics. Japan 536. South Korea 527. The OECD average is 472.
India has not participated in PISA since 2009, when students from Himachal Pradesh and Tamil Nadu ranked at the very bottom among all countries. We stopped participating. Look at the PARAKH data, and you understand why. According to it, 72 per cent of Grade 9 students cannot calculate a percentage.
Singapore teaches mathematics differently. There, a child only moves forward when they have truly understood the concept. Finland ensures that where you were born does not determine how much you learn. Japan builds both speed and understanding.
India? India pushes every child into the next grade, whether or not they understood the previous one. A child who did not understand fractions in Grade 6 is sitting in a Grade 9 algebra class, pretending to understand. This does not close the gap. It widens it. Every year, in every grade, the gap only grows.
The nation that gave the world zero — that produced Baudhayan, Aryabhata, Varahamihira, Brahmagupta, Mahavira, Bhaskara, Madhava, and Ramanujan — is not even on par with Singapore and Finland.
It is not even part of the conversation.
Part Six: From Heritage to Healing
This is where the story turns.
The Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) has done something remarkable. They have partnered with our initiative — not as a formality, but as an act of heritage reclamation. Their message is clear: to rebuild India’s mathematical future, we must reconnect with India’s mathematical past. That reconnection is our inspiration.
Imagine what happens when a girl in Shi Yomi or Sahebganj — who has been told all her life that mathematics is hard, that it’s not for people like her — learns that the very theorem she struggles with was first written on this very soil. That zero was born here. That calculus began here. That a boy from a poor family in Kumbakonam, without a teacher and without a school, became one of the greatest mathematicians in human history.
When that happens, mathematics stops being a foreign, complex subject. It becomes a family inheritance.
Samarth Trust exists to make this happen. Not to talk about education. But to change it. Directly… with children.
In 2025, 13,840 students from 24 states participated on our platform. The Adaptive Learning Framework does not assume where a child should be. It finds where the child actually is, and starts from there.
The Mathematical Numeracy Score (MNS) and Mathematical Learning Ability (MLA) framework measures exactly what PARAKH says is missing: conceptual understanding, logical reasoning, and problem-solving.
The results matched my estimates in my first article on the 4-minute possibility. Children who came in with fear and rote dependence left with confidence and conceptual clarity. Not because they were gifted, but because someone finally descended into that well where they were drowning and pulled them out.
Maths Genius 2026 is the next step in this philosophy. This is not a competition that rewards children who are already bright. This is a national platform that builds capacity in every child who participates. It is as effective in urban schools as it is in tribal villages. It includes a special provision for rewarding schools. The Kapitthaka Award (₹79,00,001) and the Vallabhi Award (₹26,00,001) have been designated for the best-performing schools. In the end, let us say it again: Maths Genius 2026 is not about finding talent. It is a campaign to change a culture.
Registration: www.iamsamarth.com | Fee: ₹99 | Registration open
Two national assessments have made one thing abundantly clear — something every honest teacher already knew.
Priya, standing in that kirana shop, should not have struggled to add up the price of rice. She deserved better. Every Priya in every small town of this country deserves better.
The nation that gave the world zero owes its children more than an average of 37 per cent.
It owes them understanding.
It owes them dignity.
It owes them the heritage that is their birthright.
Samarth stands ready to fulfil this constitutional duty.
Are you ready too?