Department of School Education, Government of Assam released Request for Expression of Interest (EOI) for Selection of Agency for Strengthening Digital Governance for School Education in Assam: Shiksha Setu 2.0.
Background:
The Department of School Education (DoSE), Government of Assam (GoA) has applied for financing from the World Bank toward the cost of the Assam: School Education and Adolescent Wellbeing Project (ASAP) and intends to apply part of the proceeds for consulting services.
The Services include supporting the DoSE in establishing a coherent, data-driven governance platform, Shiksha Setu, for all core governance functions, including identity and registry services, attendance and transfers, personnel management, financial flows, and school infrastructure, while enabling secure, standards-based interoperability with agile academic support layers and third-party innovations.
The Samagra Shiksha Axom, DoSE, invites eligible consultant firms to indicate their interest in providing the services. Interested consultants should provide information demonstrating that they have the required qualifications and relevant experience to perform the Services.
Eligibility:
- Minimum 5 years’ experience in India in World Bank-assisted projects or other State/ Central/ Multilateral Financial Institution-funded projects.
- The firm should be a CMMI Level 3 certified organization or higher for software development services. The certificate should be valid as on the date of bid submission.
- The firm should have minimum two years of demonstrable experience in designing, developing, and implementing digital solutions for education systems at national or sub-national levels.
Objective:
The objective of this assignment is to design, modernise, secure, and operationalise a state-owned Shiksha Setu governance core that: (a) consolidates and protects authoritative administrative master data; (b) provides high availability, auditable administrative workflows for various governance functions; (c) exposes secure, well-documented integration interfaces that enable additional/third-party layers (e.g., VSK 2.0) to consume authorised derivative data and deliver services without altering the source of truth; and (d) institutionalises processes, SOPs and technical artefacts required for long-term vendor independence, regulatory compliance and sustainable state operation.
The Agency shall deliver a production-grade governance platform that embodies separation of concerns: Shiksha Setu will retain exclusive authority over master administrative records (student IDs, personnel records, payroll, transfers, entitlements) and core administrative workflows, while exposing derivative, privacy-preserving feeds and APIs for authorised academic and analytical uses. The assignment will include technical design, development, integration, migration of legacy registries, operationalisation, capacity building, and a comprehensive handover and off-ramp plan that ensures the State can operate, maintain and re-procure Shiksha Setu components without operational disruption.
The Agency’s implementation shall ensure the platform meets legal, security and child-safety obligations under applicable Indian laws and World Bank guidance, provides demonstrable resilience (service level targets), and embeds vendor-neutral procurement and operational patterns that minimise lock-in risk for master administrative data.
Scope of Work
- High-level Approach and Tracks: The work is organised across two complementary tracks –
- Track A – Governance Core Foundation & Master Data: consolidate, modernise and harden the authoritative registries and administrative workflows (student, personnel, school, scholarships, attendance, transfers, works & grants), implement identity services and canonical APIs, and establish security, compliance and disaster recovery posture.
- Track B – Operational Services, Monitoring & Integrations: deliver reporting, early warning systems, financial connectors, field monitoring tools, helpdesk/CRM, image-based monitoring engines (administrative use), and the integration fabrics needed to securely federate with national systems and authorised academic platforms.
- Track A will be prioritised to secure master data and essential governance workflows; Track B will deliver enhanced operational capabilities and connectors that rely on Track A as the single source of truth.
- Foundational Reference Architecture and Standards
- The Agency shall produce a comprehensive Reference Architecture that formalises Shiksha Setu as the authoritative governance core, defines clear system boundaries vis-à-vis academic platforms, and specifies interoperability patterns. The architecture must:
- Define canonical data models for students, personnel, schools, entitlements and
infrastructure; - Specify identity and authentication services (supporting OIDC/SAML federation), RBAC and attribute-based access controls;
- Include API boundary definitions (OpenAPI), event streaming contracts (e.g., message schema, topics), payload minimisation rules and recommended middleware for reliable integration (queuing, retries, dead-letter handling);
- Define data lineage, audit trails, and provenance models so every administrative change is traceable to actor, timestamp and justification.
- The Agency shall deliver a detailed Integration & Interoperability Blueprint that prescribes connector designs, sample payloads, test harnesses and error-handling policies for various national and state interfaces (such as, UDISE+, PFMS, PM POSHAN). The Blueprint must enable both real-time and batch exchange modes and define backfill and reconciliation strategies for intermittent connectivity.
- Define canonical data models for students, personnel, schools, entitlements and
- Foundational Data Backbone: The Agency shall collaborate with the DoSE and its partners to establish and operationalise a unified digital governance backbone to support all academic components. Under this the Agency shall design and implement a central Data Lake infrastructure integrating registry, attendance, assessment and training datasets through various sources. The Agency shall support the State in defining standardised KPIs aligned with academic improvement priorities; develop and deploy data ingestion mechanisms and APIs for structured data flow from existing systems; and implement automated data validation, reconciliation and anomaly detection processes.
- The Agency shall produce a comprehensive Reference Architecture that formalises Shiksha Setu as the authoritative governance core, defines clear system boundaries vis-à-vis academic platforms, and specifies interoperability patterns. The architecture must:
- Master Registries: The Agency shall design, develop and operationalise the following authoritative services into a coherent master framework.
- Student Registry: consolidated demographic, unique identity (UDISE+ linkage), enrolment, attendance pointers, and high-level academic profile metadata (such as a pointer to Holistic Progress Card data), ensuring all sensitive educational data required for pedagogical use remains controlled by authorised derivative feeds. Provide APIs for lookups, secure tokenised derivative exports, and reconciliation processes.
- Personnel Registry: centralised teacher, school-head and administrator records including service history, transfers, payroll identifiers (linked to Manav Sampada), qualification records and professional development entitlements. Provide controlled operational workflows for transfers, leave, and appointment actions with audit logging.
- School Registry & Infrastructure: authoritative school profile including infrastructure status, SMC composition, grant entitlements, works progress and local contact points. Expose structured APIs for program management and grant reconciliation in synergy with PFMS.
- Reporting, Dashboards and Analytics backbone
- The Agency shall deploy an Integrated Dashboard Platform providing role based access for state, district and block-level users. Ensure secure authentication and user access aligned with State MIS systems.
- The platform shall deliver configurable dashboards with real-time and predictive analytics, time-series KPIs, drill-down views, a custom report builder that draws from the Data Lake as the single source-of-truth, and a natural language query interface for administrators.
- The platform shall implement exportable, auditable reporting artefacts and an API-first approach for scheduled data extracts used by evaluation teams while preserving master-data integrity.
- Administrative Workflows & Operational Modules
- Attendance Management: The Agency shall design/integrate/migrate a scalable attendance capture and reconciliation engine that accepts multi-modal inputs (biometric/facial recognition, SMS, device offline sync). Attendance records must be stored as authoritative events in Shiksha Setu with tamper-evident audit trails. Facial recognition usage must follow explicit legal review and opt in/consent policies.
- Transfers & Service Records: The Agency shall design/integrate/migrate end to-end teacher transfer workflows with preference capture, vacancy management, AI-assisted optimisation suggestions (for administrative use only), multi-level approvals and transparent audit logs. Ensure models or optimisation engines do not become the authoritative keeper of personnel data.
- Scholarships & Direct Benefit Transfers (DBT): The Agency shall integrate Shiksha Setu with PFMS and other state/national financial systems to manage entitlements, disbursal status, reconciliation and grievance flows. Provide administrative dashboards for beneficiary coverage and geo-analytic reporting.
- Works, Grants & PFMS Integration: The Agency shall develop a works and grants tracker linked to PFMS for lifecycle tracking of civil works and grant disbursals, with inspection workflows and evidence capture (including image capture for administrative verification).
- PM POSHAN Quality Monitoring: The Agency shall implement an image based quality monitoring module to support oversight of cooked mid-day meals served under PM POSHAN. The system shall allow authorised school and field officials to capture and upload geo-tagged and time-stamped photographs of meals prepared and served, with AI-assisted analysis to assess basic quality indicators such as portion adequacy, food presentation, and adherence to serving norms. The module shall provide automated flagging of potential quality concerns, maintain visual evidence logs, and generate dashboards summarising meal quality compliance across schools, blocks and districts. All AI-generated observations must include confidence indicators and be subject to human-in-the-loop verification and administrative override prior to any escalation or reporting.
- AI-Powered Image-based Monitoring of Infrastructure, Cleanliness and Facility Usage
- Professional Development and Professional Standards
- Field Monitoring & Data Collection Platform:
- Community Outreach
- Supportive Supervision
- Dropout Early Warning & Career Guidance
- Dropout Risk / Early Warning System
- Career Guidance System
- Integration with State & National Systems
- Cloud, Hosting, Disaster Recovery and Off-ramp
- Capacity Building, Change Management and Institutionalization
- Monitoring, Evaluation, Documentation and Handover
- Cross-cutting Responsibilities
Mode of Submission: Online
Last Date for Submission: 01 April 2026, 02:30 PM IST