Education Ministry releases report on Performance Grading Index for Districts

The Union Education Ministry has released the Performance Grading Index for Districts (PGI-D) combined report for 2020-21 and 2021-22, which assesses the performance of school education system at the district level by creating an index for comprehensive analysis.

The Ministry said that 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.

It devised the Performance Grading Index for states and released the report for the reference years 2017-18 to 2020-21.

Based on the success of State PGI, 83-indicator-based PGI-D has been designed to grade the performance of all districts in school education, the Union Education Ministry added.

The data is filled by districts through the online portal.

The PGI-D is expected to help the state Education departments to identify gaps at the district level and improve their performance in a decentralised manner.

The indicator-wise PGI score shows the areas where a district needs to improve.

The PGI-D report for 2018-19 and 2019-20 has been released, so far the current one is the combined report for 2020-21 and 2021-22.

According to the Union Education Ministry, the PGI-D structure comprises of total weightage of 600 points across 83 indicators, which are grouped under six categories such as Outcomes, Effective Classroom Transaction, Infrastructure Facilities and Student's Entitlements, School Safety and Child Protection, Digital Learning and Governance Process.

These categories are further divided into 12 domains like Learning Outcomes and Quality, Access Outcomes, Teacher Availability and Professional Development Outcomes, Learning Management, Learning Enrichment Activities, Infrastructure, Facilities, Student Entitlements, School Safety and Child Protection, Digital Learning, Funds convergence and utilisation, Enhancing CRCs Performance, Attendance Monitoring Systems and School Leadership Development.

PGI-D grades the districts into 10 grades like Highest achievable Grade is 'Daksh', which is applicable for districts scoring more than 90 per cent of the total points in that category or overall.

The lowest grade in PGI-D is called 'Akanshi-3' which is for scores upto 10 per cent of the total points.

The ultimate objective of PGI-D is to help the districts to priorities areas for intervention in school education and thus improve to reach the highest grade, the Ministry said.