Choosing school software in Maharashtra: boards, mediums and U-DISE

State board and CBSE do not assess the same way, and the difference is not cosmetic. Grade bands, subject grouping, how internal assessment combines with final marks, what a report card is required to show — all of it differs.

Software built for one and adapted to the other tends to show it in the report card, which is the document a school is judged on by every parent. If a vendor's existing schools are all CBSE and yours is state board, ask to see a state-board report card generated by the system. Not designed — generated.

Schools running two boards across sections have a harder version of this problem, and should ask directly whether marks and grading rules can differ by section rather than being one school-wide setting.

Maharashtra has substantial Marathi-medium, Urdu-medium and Hindi-medium school populations alongside English-medium. A school's medium affects what parents can read, which affects every document and message the school sends.

Marathi in Devanagari is usually handled competently. Urdu, in Nastaliq, usually is not — it is a genuinely harder typographic problem and it fails specifically in generated PDFs rather than on screen. If your school is Urdu-medium, that is the thing to test first, and there is a separate guide here on exactly how to test it.

One practical point for all mediums: pupil names need to exist in both the medium script and in English, because government returns and board paperwork want English while report cards want the medium. A system storing one spelling creates a permanent spreadsheet.

U-DISE+ returns want enrolment broken down in ways a school does not otherwise track daily — by category, by gender, by age against class, with specific counts on a specific reference date.

None of that is hard if the underlying records carry the fields. It is very hard if they do not, because then somebody rebuilds it from admission forms each year. When comparing vendors, ask whether the pupil record holds the categories your returns require, and whether enrolment can be reported as at a past date rather than only as it stands today.

A vendor who has never filed a Maharashtra return will not know what you are asking about. That is worth knowing before you sign, not as a criticism — but because you will be the one explaining it to them for the next year.

Specific enough that a generic answer is obvious:

We are in Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar — Aurangabad — and the schools we run are here, which is the only reason we knew about several of the problems above. State board and CBSE are both supported with grading rules configurable per section, and pupil records carry an English name alongside a local-script one.

On medium, the honest split: Urdu is complete — translated interface, right-to-left layout, and an embedded Nastaliq font so generated documents are genuinely readable. Marathi and Hindi are not at that standard. The interface is English for those schools, and documents render in English because we have not yet embedded a Devanagari font. If you are Marathi-medium and that matters to you, ask us where the work has got to rather than taking a medium list at face value — including ours.

Being local is worth saying plainly rather than implying: if something breaks during admissions, we can be at your office. That is a genuine difference from a vendor in another state, and it is most of why schools here choose us.