PERFORMANCE GRADING INDEX FOR DISTRICT

Department of School Education and Literacy under the Ministry of Education has released the Centre’s first-ever Performance Grading Index for the district (PGI-D) for the year 2018-2019 and 2019-2020.

Ministry of education approve the release of the Performance Grading Index 2019-20 for the state and union territories.

ALL ABOUT PGI-D:

• PGI-D evaluates the performance of the school education system mainly at the district level by creating an index for comprehensive analysis.
• Based on the data collected from various sources such as the unified district information system for education plus (UDISE+), National Achievement Survey(NAS),2017 and data provided by respective districts the PGD-I assesses the performance of the school education system.

Structure: Its structure comprises a total weightage of 600 points across 83 indicators, which have been divided into six categories:

• Outcomes, Effective Classroom Transaction, Infrastructure Facilities and Student Entitlements, School Safety and Child Protection, Digital Learning and Governance Process.
• Two categories — digital learning and effective classroom transaction have been added mainly due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Assessment Grades:

• The PGI-D grades the districts into ten grades. The highest achievable grade is ‘Daksh’, which is for districts scoring more than 90% of the total points in that category or the overall.
• Daksh is followed by ‘Utkarsh’ (81% to 90%), ‘Ati Uttam’ (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 up to 10% of the total points.
• Not even the single district figured in the highest ‘Daksh’ grade in both these years.

Significance:

• The score of the assessment shows the areas where a district needs to improve. The PGI-D will reflect the relative performance of all the districts on a uniform scale and will also encourage 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 union territories, which can be shared.
• It helps the students, parents, teachers and administration to know the performance of their district while can even compare with another district to evaluate their performance and efforts needed.

HIGHLIGHT OF THE REPORT

Best performer

• Three districts of Rajasthan performed the best in the assessment Sikar, Jhunjhunu, and Jaipur figured in the Utkarsh grade
• Rajasthan has the highest number of districts, with 24 districts followed by Punjab (14), Gujarat(13) and Kerala (13) in this grade.

LOWEST PERFORMANCE

• South Salmara-Mankachra (Assam), Alirajpur (Madhya Pradesh), North Garo Hills, and South Garo Hills in Meghalaya were the lowest performance
• 12 states which don’t have a single district in the Ati-Uttam and Uttam are Bihar, Goa, Jammu Kashmir, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim, Tripura and Uttarakhand.
• The number of districts in all the categories has increased which indicates the progress of many districts.