bodhi.kids, NEP 2020 and the PARAKH Holistic Progress Card

what the practice is

seven quiet minutes a day, for children in classes 3 to 8. one short story, one feeling-word, a few lines the child writes privately, and one small intention for tomorrow. then it closes itself.

it happens at home, in the family's own evening. a teacher prepares nothing, marks nothing and loses no class time. a school's part is to share its code with its families, and — if it chooses — to staff a counsellor for the rare moment a child may need support.

what NEP 2020 and PARAKH ask of a school

NEP 2020 names emotional intelligence as a competency in its own right — CG-4, the ability to understand and manage one's own emotions.

PARAKH — the standard-setting body established under NCERT in February 2023 — sets the Holistic Progress Card. its stages are the foundational stage (classes 1 and 2), the preparatory stage (classes 3 to 5) and the middle stage (classes 6 to 8).

the card asks a school to document each child's socio-emotional progress through the year — self-awareness, relationships, problem-solving, emotional intelligence and creativity — through observation, portfolios, self-assessment and parent input.

in September 2023 NCERT directed states and union territories to adopt or adapt it, and CBSE issued an implementation manual.

where this sits, and where it does not

what your school has today is a dashboard. a principal's reads as counts: how many children are linked, how many practised this week, how many sections are engaged, and the feeling-words most met across the school. it is offered in the spirit of NEP 2020 and PARAKH's attention to social-emotional growth. it is not an assessment: there are no scores and no rankings, and a principal's view names no child. what a teacher and a counsellor see is set out below, and it is not the same.

a term-by-term written record is built and is not switched on. no school has received one. we would rather say that than describe a document you would go looking for and not find.

it is not a PARAKH instrument and it is not certified as one. no government body has reviewed, approved or endorsed this practice, and we will not imply otherwise. PARAKH's method is observation-based; nothing here replaces a teacher's observation, and nothing here fills the card on your behalf.

any digital record of a child's socio-emotional life falls under the DPDP Act 2023. anyone under eighteen is a child under that act, and section 9(3) bars tracking, behavioural monitoring and profiling of children even where a parent has consented. that is not a box we tick. it is one of the reasons a child's writing is sealed to their own parent.

what the evidence says, including the inconvenient parts

the most rigorous recent review of school-based social-emotional learning pooled 424 studies from 53 countries and 575,361 students. it found real benefit, and it found it small: an overall effect of about 0.19. a companion analysis isolating academic achievement found about 0.10. earlier and narrower reviews reported more. the honest reading is that the direction is well established, the size is modest, and it depends heavily on how carefully a programme is actually run.

no study has tested this particular practice — seven minutes a day, at home, with Indian children in classes 3 to 8 — against a comparison group. we will not tell you it has been proven. we can tell you what it is built from, and what we refuse to do.

one finding shaped how it is delivered. in a three-arm randomised trial across 74 government secondary schools in Bihar, the arm delivered by lay counsellors produced large gains, while the identical programme delivered by teachers produced no benefit on its primary outcomes and some adverse signals — attributed to teacher role conflict and overload. the caveat matters as much as the finding: those were secondary schools, not classes 3 to 8, and the trial did not test an at-home practice. we read it as a reason not to place one more thing on a teacher's desk, not as evidence that our own format works.

what your school sees, and what it never sees

your school gives us no student roster. families join by their own choice with your school's code — you send us no list, and we ask for none.

our aggregates cannot point at one child. word-level patterns appear only once a floor of participating children stands behind them; below that floor we tell you we are holding them back, and show you nothing else. the floor is a setting we can raise, not a number frozen into a brochure.

one thing does name children, and it is a parent's choice, not the school's. when a parent adds their child they may switch on an optional sharing setting. if they do, that child's class teacher sees the child's name in a list beside practised or not yet for that week — never a word the child wrote. a child whose parent leaves it off appears in no teacher's list. the list is assembled by parents one at a time, and no one at the school can add a name to it.

a child's writing is readable by that child's own parent. a teacher cannot read it, and neither can a principal — that is enforced in the database, not by policy alone. there is one exception, and it is the counsellor your school staffs: if a line is flagged, that counsellor can read that line, and sees the child's name, class and section beside it. the parent's sharing setting does not cover this. that setting governs the teacher's list; it does not govern the counsellor's queue, so a flagged line reaches your counsellor with the child named either way. nothing else a child has written opens to them.

the flag itself is automatic. a fixed list of phrases is checked as the child saves their writing, and if one matches, the flag opens in that same moment — before any person has seen it. a note appears on the parent's own dashboard from that moment, so a family can learn of it before any of us has read a word.

the reading comes after. if your school has staffed a counsellor, that counsellor reads it. if it has not, it stays with us. a principal is never a recipient of a child's flag — the routing puts a flag in your counsellor's queue or in ours, and the database gives a principal no way to open one. closing a flag is the step no software does: the database refuses to close one without a written note from the person who read it.

what is deliberately not in it

no streaks, no badges, no leaderboards, no points. no push notifications — no part of the software is permitted even to ask a family for permission to send one, and a check in our build refuses the code that would.

we do send some email, so we will name it rather than claim silence. nothing is addressed to a child: a child has no email address and no phone number anywhere in our system. a parent's own address receives a letter when they sign up, a note if a flag opens on their child, and the receipts for what they pay. none of those three goes to the school.

nothing on the child's screen is built to pull them back tomorrow, and a child can stop at any point of it.

sources

1. National Education Policy 2020 — competency CG-4, emotional intelligence.
2. PARAKH Holistic Progress Card, NCERT — PARAKH established February 2023; the foundational, preparatory and middle stages and the socio-emotional domain; NCERT's September 2023 direction to states and union territories; the CBSE implementation manual.
3. Cipriano et al. (2023), Child Development — 424 studies, 53 countries, 575,361 students; overall Hedges's g ≈ 0.19. Ha et al. (2025) — academic achievement g ≈ 0.10.
4. Shinde et al. (2018), The Lancet 392:2465–2477 — SEHER, a three-arm cluster randomised trial in 74 government secondary schools in Bihar.
5. Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023, sections 9(1) and 9(3), with the DPDP Rules 2025.