National Institute of Open Schooling
organization
The National Institute of Open Schooling is a national level board of education in India, controlled and managed by the Government of India. It was established by the Ministry of Education of the Government of India in 1989.
The NIOS operates through a network of five departments, 23 regional centres, two sub-regional centres, two NIOS cells, and more than 7,400 study centres (AIs/AVIs) across India and abroad. It is recognized as the largest open schooling system in the world, with a cumulative enrolment of over 4.13 million learners during the last five years.
Between 2004 and 2009, NIOS recorded a cumulative enrolment of about 1.5 million students at the secondary and senior secondary levels, and it continues to enrol around 350,000 learners annually. NIOS functions as an autonomous organization under the Ministry of Education, Government of India, similar in status to other national educational boards such as the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE).
International collaboration and overseas centres
The NIOS collaborates with the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) and UNESCO. It also has study centres for Indian expatriates in Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Kuwait, Nepal, Canada, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Australia, United Kingdom, New Zealand, Malaysia, Singapore and the United States of America.
Courses offered
NIOS offer the following courses:
Open Basic Education (OBE) Programme for 14+ years age group (adolescents and adults) that are equivalent to classes of the formal school system
Level A - Equivalent to Class III
Level B - Equivalent to Class V
Level C - Equivalent to Class VIII
Secondary Course—Equivalent to class X
Senior Secondary Course—Equivalent to class XII
Vocational Education Courses
Life enrichment programmes
D.EL.ED. course
Secondary and Senior Secondary Courses for students at the Industrial Training Institute
Indian Sign Language as a subject at the Secondary Level for Children with Hearing Impairment (Deafness), since 2021.
Examinations
The public examinations are held twice a year in April–May and October–November on dates fixed by the NIOS. However, one is also eligible (If he/she is registered under Stream 1,3 and 4) to appear through the On-Demand Examinations at Secondary (10th) and Senior Secondary (12th). On Demand Exams are held through the year except for April–May and Oct–Nov i.e.
“National Institute of Open Schooling” enters the record as organization. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what National, Institute and Schooling can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3351151. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1989, 2004, 2009 and 2021.
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This entry incorporates text from “National Institute of Open Schooling” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.