The Department of School Education and Literacy (DoSE&L), Ministry of Education (MoE) has released the Performance Grading Index for Districts (PGI-D) for 2018-19 and 2019-20 on Monday, June 27. The PGI-D assesses the performance of the school education system at the District level by creating an index for comprehensive analysis. According to the PGI-D 2019-20 report, at least 3 districts from Rajasthan have scored more than 80 per cent in school education performance and achieved ‘Utkarsh' grade which is the second highest grade.
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As per the report, “None of the districts attained highest grade Daksh in both 2019-20 and 2018-19 implying that there is ample scope for the districts to further improve their performance in future years.”
While 3 districts, Sikar, Jhunjhunu and Jaipur from Rajasthan achieved the second grade, the number of districts in the third Atti-Uttam grade rose from 49 to 86 during 2018-29 and 2019-20, as per the PGI-D report.
In a statement, the DoSE&L said, “The Indian Education System is one of the largest in the world with about 15 lakh schools, 97 lakh teachers, and nearly 26 crore students from varied socio-economic backgrounds.”
DoSE&L had devised the Performance Grading Index (PGI) for States and released its report for the reference years 2017-18 to 2019-20. Based on the success of the State PGI, an 83-indicator-based PGI for District (PGI-D) was designed to grade the performance of all the districts in school education.
“The data is filled by the 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 decentralized manner. The indicator-wise PGI score shows the areas where a district needs to improve. The PGI-D will reflect the relative performance of all the districts in a uniform scale which encourages them to perform better,” it said.
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It MoE further stated that the PGI-D structure comprised a total weightage of 600 points across 83 indicators, which were grouped under six categories– 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, viz., Learning Outcomes and Quality (LO), Access Outcomes (AO), Teacher Availability and Professional Development Outcomes (TAPDO), Learning Management (LM), Learning Enrichment Activities (LEA), Infrastructure, Facilities, Student Entitlements (IF&SE), School Safety and Child Protection (SS&CP), Digital Learning (DL), Funds convergence and utilization (FCV), Enhancing CRCs Performance (CRCP), Attendance Monitoring Systems (AMS) and School Leadership Development (SLD).”
The ministry said, “PGI-D has graded the districts into ten grades viz., Highest achievable Grade is Daksh, which is for the 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 PGI-D 2020-21 is currently under compilation as the PGI-D 2018-19 and 2019-20 have provided insight into the intra-State comparison of the progress of School education.
