PGI-D

• Recently, the Department of School Education and Literacy (DoSE&L), Ministry of Education (MoE) released the Centre’s first-ever Performance Grading Index for Districts (PGI-D) for 2018-19 and 2019-20.
• In June, 2021, the Union Education Minister has approved the release of Performance Grading Index (PGI) 2019-20 for States and Union Territories
• PGI-D assesses the performance of the school education system at the district level by creating an index for comprehensive analysis.
• The PGI-D assessed district-level performance in school education based on the data collected from various sources, including Unified District Information System for Education Plus (UDISE +), National Achievement Survey (NAS), 2017 and data provided by respective districts.
• The PGI-D structure comprises a total weightage of 600 points across 83 indicators, which are grouped under six categories:
• Outcomes, Effective Classroom Transaction, Infrastructure Facilities & Student’s Entitlements, School Safety & Child Protection, Digital Learning and Governance Process.
• Two categories — digital learning and effective classroom transaction have been added in the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, these categories were not part of the state-level PGI.
• These categories are further divided into 12 domains.
• The PGI-D grades the districts into 10 grades. The highest achievable grade is ‘Daksh’, which is for districts scoring more than 90% of the total points in that category or overall.
• It is followed by ‘Utkarsh’ (81% to 90%), ‘AtiUttam’ (71% to 80%), ‘Uttam’ (61% to 70%), ‘Prachesta-1’ (51% to 60%) and ‘Prachesta-2’ (41% to 50%).
• The lowest grade in PGI-D is ‘Akanshi-3’ which is for scores upto 10% of the total points.
• None of the districts figured in the highest ‘Daksh’ grade in both these years.

Significance:

• 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.
• At the same time, it will also act as a good source of information for best practices followed by States and UTs which can be shared.
• It helps all the stakeholders in the school education system, including the students, parents, teachers, and administrators to know the performance of their district vis-à-vis other districts.

Key Highlights of the Report

• Three districts from Rajasthan performed the best in the assessment.
• According to the report, the three districts — Sikar, Jhunjhunu, and Jaipur figured in ‘Utkarsh’ grade in 2019-20 in contrast to a year before when no district featured in that category.
• Rajasthan has the highest 24 districts in this grade, followed by Punjab (14), Gujarat (13), and Kerala (13).
• The districts with the lowest scores (1 out of 50) in this category were:
• South Salmara-Mankachar (Assam), Alirajpur (Madhya Pradesh), North Garo Hills and South Garo Hills in Meghalaya, and Khowai (Tripura) in 2019-20.
• The 12 states/ UTs which don’t have a single district in the Ati-Uttam and Uttam are:
• Bihar, Goa, Jammu and Kashmir, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim, Tripura and Uttarakhand.

Progress:

• As per the report, the number of districts in all categories has increased.
• In the ‘AtiUttam’ grade, the number of districts increased from 49 to 86 during 2018-19 to 2019-20 showing “remarkable improvements”.
• 33 districts improved their score in outcomes, but there is no grade-level improvement.
• The outcomes category includes learning outcomes of students, teachers’ availability and professional outcomes.
• Digital Learning Category: As compared to 2018-19, 20 districts have shown over 20% improvement while 43 districts bettered their score by over 10% during 2019-20.
• Infrastructural Facilities: 478 districts improved their score in 2019-20 as compared to 2018-19.
• Out of these 478, 37 districts made an improvement of over 20% improvement in score and 115 districts made an improvement of over 10% implying grade-level improvement.

SOURCE: THE HINDU,THE ECONOMIC TIMES,MINT