14 Punjab districts perform well in school education across India

Vibha Sharma

New Delhi, June 27

Punjab has performed well in the first-ever report on Performance Grading Index for Districts (PGI-D) for 2019-20. This is an assessment of performance of school education system at the district level by the Education Ministry. 14 districts of the state are in the ‘Ati-Uttam’ grade (score of 71% to 80%), followed by Gujarat and Kerala with 13 districts each in the category.

With a score of 441 each, Gurdaspur and Nawanshahr have topped the ‘Ati-Uttam’ grade in state followed by Ferozpur, Jalandhar, Sangrur, Hoshiarpur, Fazilka, Ludhiana, Amritsar, Bathinda, Kapurthala, Mansa, Faridkot and Moga. Scoring 457, Chandigarh too is listed in the category. 

As far as Haryana is concerned, Panchkula, Bhiwani, Palwal, Karnal, Kurukshetra, Ambala, Yamunanagar and Nuh have been put under ‘Prachesta-1’ grade (51% to 60%) category and the remaining under ‘Uttam’ (61% to 70%).

Meanwhile, Sirmaur, Solan and Lahaul and Spiti in Himachal Pradesh have been categorsied under Prachesta-2 (41 % to 50 %) grade.

No district managed to secure the ‘Daksh’ grade—a score of more than 90% of the total points.

Meanwhile, Rajasthan is leading the states with three districts ranking in the ‘Utkarsh’ grade (score of 81% to 90%) with Sikar scoring 488, Jhunjhuni 486 and Jaipur 482.

The 12 states/ UTs which do not 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.

Individually, Punjab, Chandigarh, Tamil Nadu, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and Kerala received the highest grade in 2019-20 in school education as per the Performance Grading Index (PGI)

The PGI-D 2018-19 and 2019-20 aimed to provide insight into intra-state comparison of progress of school education, grading 725 districts in 2018-19 and 733 districts in 2019-20 across the States / UTs, as  per officials.

The PGI-D structure comprises of total weightage of 600 points across 83 indicators grouped under six categories—Outcomes, Effective Classroom Transaction, Infrastructure Facilities and Student’s Entitlements, School Safety & Child Protection, Digital Learning and Governance Process, they said

These categories are further divided into 12  domains—  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).

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.

The lowest grade in PGI-D is ‘Akanshi-3’—a score upto10%.

The ultimate objective of PGI-D is to help the districts to prioritise areas for intervention in school education and thus improve to reach the highest grade. The PGI-D 2020-21 is presently under compilation.