A clear guide to India's standard diagnostic tool for specific learning disabilities — what it assesses, who it's for, and how it's used to diagnose dyslexia, dyscalculia, and dysgraphia.
The NIMHANS SLD Battery, sometimes called the NIMHANS Index for Specific Learning Disabilities, is the standard diagnostic tool used in India to identify specific learning disabilities in children. Developed at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS) in Bengaluru, it is a structured set of tasks administered by a qualified psychologist to assess whether a child's difficulties in reading, writing, or mathematics amount to a specific learning disability — dyslexia, dysgraphia, or dyscalculia — rather than being explained by other factors. Because it is standardised and administered one-to-one by a trained professional, it produces a diagnosis that schools, boards, and medical authorities recognise.
The battery looks across the core academic skills where a specific learning disability shows up, building a profile of a child's strengths and difficulties.
Accuracy, fluency, and comprehension — the skills affected in dyslexia.
Handwriting, spelling, and written expression — the skills affected in dysgraphia.
Number sense, calculation, and mathematical reasoning — the skills affected in dyscalculia.
Attention, memory, and processing tasks that help explain the pattern of difficulty.
The specific tasks and scoring are standardised and administered only by qualified professionals — which is what makes the results valid and recognised.
The battery is designed for school-age children who are struggling with reading, writing, or mathematics in a way that is out of step with their overall ability and effort. It is typically used once a child has been formally learning these skills for a few years, so that a meaningful gap between ability and achievement can be measured — commonly from around age eight onwards, though the right timing depends on the individual child.
It is most often used when a school has flagged a persistent difficulty, when a bright child is unexpectedly underperforming, or when parents want a clear answer about whether a specific learning disability is present. The diagnosis it supports is also the clinical basis for school accommodations and, where applicable, for applications to a medical board for a disability certificate.
The NIMHANS SLD Battery is administered one-to-one by a qualified psychologist, in a structured, standardised way. It is not a questionnaire, and it cannot be self-administered or completed online — standardised administration is exactly what makes the results valid and recognised by schools, boards, and medical authorities.
A trained clinician presents the tasks in a set manner, records responses carefully, and interprets the results against established norms, alongside the child's history and other relevant information. The outcome is not simply a pass or fail, but a clinical profile — which skills are affected, how significantly, and what that means for the child's learning. This is why the person administering the battery matters as much as the tool itself.
Free online "SLD tests" or checklists can raise a concern worth exploring, but they are not the NIMHANS SLD Battery and cannot provide a diagnosis. Only a standardised assessment by a qualified professional can do that.
At Coach For Mind, our RCI-registered Clinical Psychologists use the NIMHANS SLD Battery as part of a full learning disability assessment, producing a clear diagnosis and a detailed clinical report suitable for submission to schools and boards. We offer this at our Sector 70, Gurgaon clinic.