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SchoolDeck · Index

Guides to the portals, filings and rules schools live with

These guides cover the statutory and administrative work Indian schools repeat every year: UDISE+ and PEN, APAAR IDs, CBSE OASIS, LOC submission and affiliation, DigiLocker, state portals including Shala Darpan, Saral and Tamil Nadu EMIS, RTE admissions, the DPDP Act, NCF 2023, and safety and fire NOC requirements.

Portals, forms and deadlines change between cycles, often without notice. Every guide names its source; verify against the official portal before you file.

The filings are not hard. What makes them expensive is that they land on whoever is free that week, the reasoning from last year is gone, and the data has to be reconstructed from registers that have since moved on.

These are written by the people who do the migrations, which means they are mostly about what goes wrong and in what order to do things — not a restatement of the circular you have already read.

Written by
Implementations, not marketing
Scope
Central and state portals, compliance, admissions
Sources
Primary documents cited and dated
Corrections
Made in the page, dated, not silently
01

What each group of guides covers

  • Identifiers and returns. UDISE+, PEN and APAAR — what each one is, how they differ, and where duplicate student records come from.
  • CBSE. Affiliation, the OASIS portal, and LOC submission, which is the filing with the least forgiving deadline of the year.
  • State portals. Shala Darpan, Saral in Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu EMIS — each with its own data model and its own idea of what a section is.
  • Admissions and entitlements. The RTE 25% process, and the admission season checklist that decides whether the rest of the year is calm.
  • Compliance. The DPDP Act as it applies to student data, NCF 2023, safety guidelines and fire NOC.
  • Buying. How to choose a school ERP without ending up with the one that demoed best.
02

Read in order, if you are about to do the thing

Most of these are only useful in a specific fortnight. If admission season opens next month, the checklist and the RTE guide are the two that matter and the rest can wait. If it is UDISE+ season, start with identifiers and fix your enrolment snapshot before touching the portal.

The one worth reading out of season is the DPDP guide, because the decisions it describes — what you collect, who can see it, how long you keep it — are cheap to make correctly at setup and expensive to retrofit.

FAQ

Questions people ask

Phrased the way they arrive, answered so each one stands on its own.

How often are these guides updated?

When the underlying rule or portal changes, and at minimum once a year before the relevant season. Each guide carries the date it was last checked and by which desk.

Do I need SchoolDeck to use these?

No. They describe the statutory process, not our product. Where SchoolDeck makes a step easier the guide says so plainly and briefly, rather than throughout.

Can we reprint a guide for our staff?

Yes, for internal training, with attribution and without alteration. Ask before republishing one publicly.

Related

Read next

1 page

Everything under this section

Each one answers a single question outright, then shows the working.

/schooldeck/guides/
Provenance

Who checked this, and against what

Accountability

Checked by the Implementations desk on 1 September 2026. Corrections go in the page, dated, rather than quietly.

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