Chandigarh, Punjab among top school education performers, Meghalaya lags

Chandigarh placed in fifth-highest grade in PGI-D 2023-24 for school education, while Punjab and Delhi follow in the seventh level alongside Gujarat, Kerala and others

Chandigarh, Punjab, and Delhi have emerged as the best performers in school education across indicators such as learning outcomes, equity, and infrastructure in the Union Education Ministry’s Performance Grading Index for Districts (PGI-D) report for the year 2023–24, released on Wednesday.

 

The PGI grades states and union territories (UTs) into ten distinct performance levels. While no state or UT made it to the top four levels, Chandigarh was the only unit placed in Prachesta-1, the fifth-highest level, for which a state must score between 701 and 760 out of a total 1,000 points.

 

Following this, ten states and UTs were placed in the seventh level, or Prachesta-3, with scores between 581 and 640 points. These include Punjab, Delhi, Gujarat, Odisha, Kerala, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Haryana, Goa, Maharashtra, and Rajasthan.

 

 

At the other end of the spectrum was Meghalaya, the lone state ranked in the tenth level, with a score of 417.9 out of 1,000.

 

Other state units such as Puducherry, Himachal Pradesh, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and West Bengal were among the average performers, according to the index.

 

A senior ministry official said that the PGI has been conceptualised as a tool to catalyse transformational change in school education, with the objective of assessing the relative performance of all districts on a uniform scale.

 

“It aims to measure the performance of states and UTs using handpicked indicators to assist states in evidence-based decision-making through simple tools,” the official added.

 

The highest achievable grade in PGI-D is Utkarsh, awarded to districts scoring more than 90 per cent of the total points in that category or overall. No state or UT has achieved this level yet.

 

Each subsequent grade is determined by reducing the category and overall score by equal widths of 10 per cent of the total points to arrive at the next grade.