Performance Grading Index for Districts (PGI-D)

Performance Grading Index for Districts (PGI-D)

News: Recently, the Ministry of Education (MoE) has released the Performance Grading Index for Districts (PGID) as a combined report for 2020-21 and 2021-22 which assesses the performance of school education system at the district level.

What is PGI-D?
• Performance Grading Index (PGI) for district is a tool to provide insights on the status of school education in districts across States and UTs.
• The PGI-D structure comprises of 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) and others.
• 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 priorities areas for intervention in school education and thus improve to reach the highest grade.

Key Findings:
• The pandemic led to a decline in educational performance of many districts in the country, reveals a report from the Ministry of Education (MoE).
• Performance of States: While none of the districts were able to earn the top two grades — Daksh and Utkarsh.
• About 121 districts were graded as Ati-Uttam for 2020-21, though this number fell by more than half in 2021-22, with just 51 districts making the grade.
• Further attesting to the pandemic effect, while 2020-21 had 86 districts under Prachesta-2 (sixth-highest grade), this number rose to 117 in 2021-22.
• Among districts graded as ‘Ati-Uttam’ for 2020-22 were Krishna and Guntur in Andhra Pradesh; Chandigarh; Dadra Nagar Haveli; several districts in Delhi, Karnataka, and Kerala; Jagatsinghpur, Cuttack, Bharat, Ganjam, Puri, and Khurdha in Odisha; Siddipet in Telangana; Valsad, Junagadh and Sabarkantha in Gujarat, etc.
• The report is expected to help State education departments identify gaps at the district level and improve their performance in a decentralised manner.
• There are indicator-wise PGI scores that show the areas where a district needs to improve.
Source – PIB