New Delhi (The Hawk): The Indian Education System is one of the largest in the world with about 14.9 lakh schools, 95 lakh teachers, and nearly 26.5 crore students from varied socio-economic backgrounds. Department of School Education & Literacy, Ministry of Education, devised Performance Grading Index (PGI) for States and UTs which assesses the performance of school education system at the State/UT level by creating an index for comprehensive analysis. The PGI - States/UTs was first released for the year 2017-18 and so far, has been released up to the year 2020-21.
Over the period, many of the indicators in PGI – States/UTs have been outlived and become redundant. Also, the structure of PGI – States/UTs has been heavily tilted towards the indicators related to Governance Processes rather than the quality indicators. Therefore, to have more updated base with quality indicators, to align with new initiatives of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, to monitor indicators relating to Goal 4 of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and to replace existing indicators which have achieved optimal target, the PGI – State structure for 2021-22 has been revised and renamed as PGI 2.0. In PGI 2.0 , the data source for many of the indicators has been the data from UDISE+ and the grades have been aligned with the PGI - District to have uniformity and better comparability.
The new PGI structure covers 73 indicators, focused more on qualitative assessment besides including digital initiatives and teacher education. The grades/level obtained by States/UTs in previous edition of the PGIs are thus not comparable as with the grades/levels obtained by States/UTs in this new edition.
The PGI 2.0 structure comprises of 1000 points across 73 indicators grouped into 2 categories viz., Outcomes, Governance Management (GM). These categories are further divided into 6 domains, viz., Learning Outcomes (LO), Access (A), Infrastructure & Facilities (IF), Equity (E), Governance Process (GP) & Teachers Education and Training (TE&T).
PGI 2.0 for 2021-22 classified the States/UTs into ten grades viz., highest achievable Grade is Daksh, which is for State/UT scoring more than 940 points out of total of 1000 points. The lowest grade is Akanshi-3 which is for score up to 460. The ultimate aim of PGI 2.0 is to propel States & UTs towards undertaking multi-pronged interventions that will bring about the much-desired optimal education outcomes covering all dimensions. Indicators of PGI 2.0 have been aligned to policy initiatives and interventions introduced post implementation of National Education policy (NEP) 2020 for proper tracking the progress. The PGI 2.0 is expected to help States and UTs to pinpoint the gaps and accordingly prioritize areas for intervention to ensure that the school education system is robust at every level. PGI 2.0 scores and grades achieved by States/UTs in 2021-22 bear a testimony to the efficacy of the PGI system. The indicator-wise PGI 2.0 score shows the areas where a State/UT needs to improve.
