What is the Performance Grading Index for Districts (PGI)?

The Department of School Education and Literacy (DoSE&L), Ministry of Education released the Performance Grading Index for Districts (PGI-D) combined report for 2020-21 & 2021-22 which assesses the performance of the school education system at the district level by creating an index for comprehensive analysis.

What is PGI-D and why is it important?

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. DoSE&L devised the Performance Grading Index (PGI) for States and released a report for the reference years 2017-18 to 2020-21. Based on the success of State PGI, 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.

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The PGI-D is expected to help the state education departments to identify gaps at the district level and improve their performance in a decentralized manner. The indicator-wise PGI score shows the areas where a district needs to improve. The PGI-D report for 2018-19 and 2019-20 has been released so far; the current one is a combined report for 2020-21 & 2021-22.

How is PGI-D structured and graded?

The PGI-D structure comprises total weight age of 600 points across 83 indicators, which are grouped under 6 categories viz., Outcomes, Effective Classroom Transaction, Infrastructure Facilities & Student’s Entitlements, School Safety & Child Protection, Digital Learning and Governance Process. 

These categories are further divided into 12 domains, viz., Learning Outcomes and Quality (LO), Access Outcomes (AO), Teacher Availability and Professional Development Outcomes (TAPDO), Learning Management (LM), Learning Enrichment Activities (LEA), Infrastructure, Facilities, Student Entitlements (IF&SE), School Safety and Child Protection (SS&CP), Digital Learning (DL), Funds convergence and utilization (FCV), Enhancing CRCs Performance (CRCP), Attendance Monitoring Systems (AMS) and School Leadership Development (SLD).

PGI-D grades the districts into ten grades viz., Highest achievable Grade is Daksh, which is for Districts scoring more than 90% of the total points in that category or overall. The lowest grade in PGI-D is called Akanshi-3 which is for scores upto10% of the total points. Ultimate objective of PGI-D is to help the Districts to prioritize areas for intervention in school education and thus improve to reach the highest grade.

What are the key findings and highlights of the PGI-D report?

The PGI-D report for 2020-21 & 2021-22 covers data from all the districts of India except Ladakh and Lakshadweep. Some of the key findings and highlights of the report are:

• The overall average score of all districts has increased from 260 in 2018-19 to 290 in 2020-21 & 2021-22.
• The number of districts scoring more than 400 points has increased from 4 in 2018-19 to 20 in 2020-21 & 2021-22.
• The number of districts scoring less than 200 points has decreased from 153 in 2018-19 to 86 in 2020-21 & 2021-22.
• The highest scoring district in PGI-D is Pathanamthitta in Kerala with a score of 518 followed by Kottayam in Kerala with a score of 516.
• The lowest scoring district in PGI-D is Kiphire in Nagaland with a score of 79 followed by Longleng in Nagaland with a score of 80.
• The top performing states/UTs in terms of average score of their districts are Kerala, Chandigarh, Delhi, Tamil Nadu and Andaman & Nicobar Islands.
• The most improved states/UTs in terms of average score of their districts from 2018-19 to 2020-21 & 2021-22 are Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh.