Focus: GS II- Government policies and Interventions
Why in News?
The Ministry of Education has released the Performance Grading Index for Districts (PGI-D) for 2019 which studied 83 indicators grouped in six categories.
What is PGI-D?
- The PGI for District (PGI-D), which comprises 83 indicators, was created to assess how well each district is performing in terms of education.
- Through an internet portal, districts enter the data.
- A district’s areas for improvement are shown by the indicator-by-indicator PGI score.
- There are 83 indications totaling 600 points in the PGI-D framework.
- They are divided into six categories: outcomes, effective classroom transactions, infrastructure facilities and students’ entitlements, school safety and child protection, digital learning, and governance process.
- These categories are outcomes, effective classroom transaction, infrastructure facilities and student’s entitlements, school safety and child protection, digital learning and governance process.
Significance
- In order to motivate districts to perform better, the PGI-D will reflect the relative performance of each district on a consistent scale.
- The state education agencies should be able to use it to discover performance gaps at the district level and make decentralised improvements.
How does the grading scale works?
- The PGI-D grades the districts into 10 grades with the highest achievable grade being ‘Daksh’, which is for districts scoring more than 90% of the total points in that category or overall.
- ‘Utkarsh’ category is for districts with score between 81-90%, followed by ‘Ati-Uttam’ (71-80%), ‘Uttam’ (61-70%), ‘Prachesta-I’ (51-60%), ‘Prachesta-II’ (41-50%) and ‘Pracheshta III’ (31-40%).
- The lowest grade in PGI-D is called ‘Akanshi-3’ which is for scores up to 10% of the total points.
Performance of the states
- Rajasthan’s Sikar is the top performer, followed by Jhunjhunu and Jaipur.
- The other States whose districts have performed best are Punjab with 14 districts in ‘Ati-uttam’ grade (scoring 71-80% on a scale of 100).
- It followed by Gujarat and Kerala with each having 13 districts in this category.
- However, there are 12 States and UTs which do not have even a single district in the ‘Ati-uttam’ and ‘Uttam’ categories and these include seven of the eight States from the North East region.
