Performance Grading Index

The Department of School Education and Literacy has released the Performance Grading Index for Districts (PGI-D) for 2018-19 and 2019-20 which assesses the performance of school education system at the District level by creating an index for comprehensive analysis.

What is ‘Performance Grading Index’ (PGI)?

• First published in 2019 with reference year 2017-18, Performance Grading Index is a tool to grade all States and UTs on their performance across 83 indicators on school education.
• The Indicators have been grouped into 6 Categories – Outcomes, Effective Classroom Transaction, Infrastructure Facilities & Student’s Entitlements, School Safety & Child Protection, Digital Learning and Governance Process. These categories are further divided into 12 Domains.
• It aims to encourage States & UTs to adopt best practices like online recruitment and transfer of teachers, electronic attendance of students & teachers.
• PGI-D grades the districts into ten grades  viz., 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 called Akanshi-3 which is for scores upto10% of the total points.
• 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.
• Grading system assists the States & UTs to identify gaps and design appropriate interventions to bridge them.

Findings –

• The top performing districts were Jaipur, Sikar and Jhunjhunu in Rajasthan. All three have scored more than 80 per cent overall under the various parameters defined by the ministry.
• The report showed that most districts in India fell under the ‘Uttam’ (61 to 70%) and the ‘Prachesta-1’ (51 to 60 % score) category in both years.
• Rajasthan has also scored high in the states category, followed by Chandigarh, Karnataka and Jharkhand. Among the overall best-performing states and Union Territories in 2019-20 were Punjab, Chandigarh, Kerala, Andaman & Nicobar and Tamil Nadu.
• The top five achievers for 2018-19 were Chandigarh, Gujarat, Kerala, Delhi and Maharashtra.