The Centre’s decision to take over from a think tank an annual data survey of school infrastructure and make it an entirely online process is likely to delay the results, which are key to policy decisions on the education of the young.

During the two decades that the National Institute of Educational Planning and Administration, a public-funded think tank, handled the project, it started collecting the data from the states by September 30 and finished the job by May.

By August, statistics about teacher vacancies and infrastructure — toilets, drinking water, labs, libraries — across the country’s 15.53 lakh government and private schools was out, setting the stage for decisions on funding for the states.

This year, data collection for the Unified District Information on School Education (UDISE) 2018-19 is yet to be completed and the results are unlikely to be released by August.

The project ran into rough weather as soon as the department of school education and literacy, under the human resource development ministry, decided to take it over last October from the think tank, an expert body on data collection, processing and analysis.

Ministry sources said the department asked all the schools to feed the data online. The think tank used to secure the data through the states, whom it allowed to collect the information offline from schools and send it along in a computerised form, through database files or CDs.

But the school education department decided that getting the data directly from the schools would eliminate any distortion by state authorities and produce more authentic results — the key official reason for the government taking over the project.

The department took the help of the National Informatics Centre and the ministry’s own statistics division to coordinate the project. The first problem was that the preparation of the format and software for online data collection took a long time. The collection began at least three months late — early this year instead of last September.

Then the project encountered another problem: the poor Internet penetration at rural government schools. According to the UDISE report for 2015-16, only 14 per cent of these schools had functional computers.

So, the department relented and allowed the states to collect the data offline, but told them they would have to format the information and forward it online.

“It may not be possible to release the statistics in August. Statistics from previous years will then have to be used for policy decisions,” an official said.

School education data are used to assess the progress made by the states in implementing central government schemes on the recruitment of teachers and improvement of school infrastructure — and are therefore used to decide the funding to the states.

“These data show the impact of the central government’s initiatives on the ground. The data are crucial to taking policy decisions at the central, state and district levels,” A.K. Rath, a former school education secretary, said. He said data collection should be left to experts.

“The department would have been better placed to take decisions if the data came through an expert body with the necessary experience,” Rath said.

He said that raising the department’s workload would unnecessarily slow the pace of work.

An email sent to the department on Tuesday seeking its comments on the probable data delay had evoked no response till this report was filed.