Economics
In news: The Education Ministry on Thursday released the latest edition of the Performance Grading Index (PGI) report for the academic year 2020-21.
About:
- It is a new index that measures the performance of states and union territories on a uniform scale to analyse the transformational change in the field of school education.
- There are five parameters on which performances are graded – learning outcome, access, equity, infrastructure facilities and governance process.
- The PGI report is generated through existing Management Information System platforms such as Unified District Information System for Education (UDISE), National Achievement Survey (NAS) and Mid-Day Meal (MDM), from where information is gathered.
- The infrastructure facilities domain includes measures such as providing safe infrastructure, working toilets, clean drinking water, clean and attractive spaces, electricity, computing devices, internet, libraries, and sports and recreational resources, among others.
- The governance process domain, aims to capture the performance of all states/UTs through indicators such as making use of IT instead of human interface, digital attendance of students, teachers, transfer of funds digitally, time taken by the state government to release the funds, filling vacancies and transfer of teachers through transparent online systems, availability of digital facilities, timely availability of textbooks and uniforms — which are critical inputs for better performance of students — are also measured in this domain.
Findings:
- Maharashtra has been ranked first, along with Punjab and Kerala.
- The state has a total score of 928/1000, elevating it to the top position from the eighth rank it had last year.
- Maharashtra has shown considerable improvement in domains such as infrastructure facilities and governance processes.
- MH’s score in infrastructure domain jumped to 143/150 from 126/150 in the year 2019-20.
- MH’s score in governance process domain, jumped to 340/360 from only 299/360 last year.
Source: Indian Express
