New Delhi: The Ministry of Education today released a new Performance Grading Index – PGI 2.0 – with a more updated base with quality indicators. It said many of the indicators in the previous PGI for States and Union Territories were heavily tilted towards the indicators related to governance processes rather than the quality indicators and hence became redundant, and needed updation.
The PGI for States and Union Territories (UTs), devised by the Department of School Education and Literacy, Ministry of Education, assesses the performance of the school education system at the State and Union Territory levels by creating an index for comprehensive analysis. It was first released for the year 2017-18 and had so far been released up to the year 2020-21.
However, the Ministry claimed in the last 4 years, States and UTs reached saturation levels in many indicators of PGI, and few indicators became redundant due to rapid changes adopted during the COVID-19 period.
It may be mentioned that the global education development agenda reflected in the Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4) adopted by India in 2015 seeks to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all by 2030.
As it is, the Indian education system is one of the largest in the world with about 14.9 lakh schools, 95 lakh teachers, and nearly 26.5 crore students from varied socio-economic backgrounds. Hence, such a goal requires proper assessment and monitoring of indicators set out in goals so that all of the critical targets of sustainable development can be achieved by 2030.
PGI was therefore devised to help States and UTs to identify specific interventions required to make transformational changes in school education. However, as the Ministry said, of late it was realised that teachers’ education, being one of the important components of learning outcomes of students, had a meagre representation in PGI whereas governance which is a quantitative parameter had an over-representation.
Therefore, to have more updated base with quality indicators, to align with new initiatives of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, to monitor indicators relating to Goal 4 of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and to replace existing indicators which have achieved the optimal target, the PGI – State structure for 2021-22 was revised and renamed as PGI 2.0.
In PGI 2.0, the data source for many of the indicators has been the data from UDISE+ [Unified District Information System for Education+] and the grades have been aligned with the PGI – District to have uniformity and better comparability.
The new PGI structure covers 73 indicators focused more on qualitative assessment besides including digital initiatives and teacher education. The grades/levels obtained by States and UTs in the previous edition of the PGIs are thus not comparable to the grades/levels obtained by States and UTs in this new edition.
The PGI 2.0 structure is comprised of 1000 points across 73 indicators grouped into 2 categories – Outcomes, Governance Management (GM). These categories are further divided into 6 domains – Learning Outcomes (LO), Access (A), Infrastructure & Facilities (IF), Equity (E), Governance Process (GP), and Teachers’ Education and Training (TE&T).
PGI 2.0 for 2021-22 classified the States and UTs into ten grades. The highest achievable grade is Daksh, which is for State and UT scoring more than 940 points out of a total of 1000 points. The lowest grade is Akanshi-3 which is for a score up to 460.
The Ministry said that the ultimate aim of PGI 2.0 is to propel States and UTs towards undertaking multi-pronged interventions that will bring about the much-desired optimal education outcomes covering all dimensions.
It said indicators of PGI 2.0 have been aligned to policy initiatives and interventions introduced post-implementation of National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 for proper tracking of the progress. The PGI 2.0 is expected to help States and UTs to pinpoint the gaps and accordingly prioritize areas for intervention to ensure that the school education system is robust at every level.
PGI 2.0 scores and grades achieved by States and UTs in 2021-22 bear testimony to the efficacy of the PGI system, the Ministry said, adding that the indicator-wise PGI 2.0 score shows the areas where a State/UT needs to improve.
– global bihari bureau
