Context: Recently, Ministry of Education has released the Performance Grading Index for Districts (PGI-D) for 2019 which studied 83 indicators grouped in six categories.

PGI-D

• The 83-indicator-based PGI for District (PGI-D) has been designed to grade the performance of all districts in school education.
• The data is filled by districts through an online portal.
• The indicator-wise PGI score shows the areas where a district needs to improve.
• The PGI-D structure comprises a total weightage of 600 points across 83 indicators.
• They are grouped under 6 categories i.e. outcomes, effective classroom transaction, infrastructure facilities and student’s entitlements, school safety and child protection, digital learning and governance process.

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.

Significance

• The PGI-D will reflect the relative performance of all the districts on a uniform scale which encourages them to perform better.
• It is expected to help the state education departments to identify gaps at the district level and improve their performance in a decentralized manner.