On National Education Day, 11 November 2026, the Chief Minister's Office of Assam turned the spotlight on two state-level schemes quietly reshaping the schooling landscape for thousands of young Assamese — and the barrier they are designed to break is as old as poverty itself. The post, shared by the CMO, highlighted how the CM Dr. Himanta Biswa Sarma-led government is deploying quality infrastructure upgrades and direct financial support to keep children in classrooms. At the centre of that effort are two targeted programmes: Nijut Moina, designed to support girls and reduce the risk of child marriage, and Nijut Babu, its counterpart for boys — both aimed squarely at the dropout crisis that continues to shadow India's northeastern states.

What Nijut Moina and Nijut Babu are built to do

National Education Day is observed every year on 11 November to mark the birth anniversary of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, India's first Education Minister — a statesman who saw universal schooling as the republic's foundational promise. The Assam government used the occasion to frame its own answer to that promise: conditional financial incentives that make staying in school the economically rational choice for families under pressure. Nijut Moina specifically targets girls at risk of early marriage, a persistent challenge across rural Assam where economic stress can fast-track a daughter's exit from school and into a household. Nijut Babu extends a parallel financial lifeline to boys, addressing the equally common pull of early labour over continued education. Together, the schemes reflect a dual-track approach: plug the dropout pipeline at both ends.

Assam's broader education infrastructure push since 2021

Since Himanta Biswa Sarma took charge as Chief Minister in 2021, the state government has pursued education interventions that pair physical infrastructure — classrooms, facilities, connectivity — with welfare transfers. The strategy sits within the broader framework of the National Education Policy 2020, which calls on states to attack socio-economic barriers to retention, not just expand enrolment numbers on paper. Assam's approach tracks a wider pattern among northeastern states: targeted state-level schemes that go beyond the central government's toolkit to address hyper-local barriers — geography, gender norms, and household economics among them. For a state where dropout rates have historically tracked poverty contours, the combination of infrastructure and cash support is a deliberate design choice. Enrolment and retention data for both schemes, expected in upcoming state education reports, will be the real test of whether these initiatives are moving the needle — or whether the promise of the classroom is still losing to the pull of circumstance.