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Dimapur, June 6 (EMN): Nagaland has been graded level -7 (grade 4) in the third edition of the Performance Grading Index (PGI) report released by the department of School Education and Literacy (DoSEL), Ministry of Education on Sunday.
Union Education Minister, Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank in a Twitter update approved the release of the Performance Grading Index (PGI) 2019-20 for states and union territories of India.
The Central government introduced PGI with a set of 70 parameters to maintain standards and uniformity in education across the country while giving ample scope for the country’s diverse culture and heritage to grow and flourish.
For the first time, five states and UTs crossed the threshold of 90% PGI score and reached Grade I++ (level-2) namely Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Chandigarh, Kerala, Punjab, and Tamil Nadu.
Nagaland was in level-7 with a score of 651-700 (which is grade 4), as per the report (see table).
“The PGI evaluation provides a grade to the States and UTs, as opposed to ranking. Grading, by allowing several States and UTs to be considered at the same level, eliminates the phenomenon of one improving only at the cost of others, thereby casting a stigma of underperformance on the latter, though, in effect they may have maintained status quo or even done better than earlier,” it read.
A major purpose of the PGI was creation of an environment that would nudge each state/UT to improve its performance continuously. As per the report, the state wise performance in PGI 2019-20 compared to PGI 2018-19 shows that 33 states and UTs have improved their PGI score in 2019-20.
According to the report, Nagaland improved the score by 5 to 10%. The states which are lower than level-3 ‘have considerable ground to cover to reach the maximum aggregate points of 1000,’ it stated.
A domain-wise analysis revealed that in governance and management, Nagaland was at the bottom just next to Chhattisgarh and Ladakh with less than 50% score.
Moreover, in this domain there were 24 states/UTs which scored less than 288 (80% of the maximum possible score), implying that it is an area that needs to be focussed upon.
The Ministry acknowledged that shortage of teachers and principals and administrative staff; lack of regular supervision and inspection; inadequate training of the teachers; timely availability of finances (all of which are captured in the Governance and Management Domain) are some of the factors plaguing the education system in the country.
According to the report, data for 54 of the 70 parameters are for the year 2019-20. The updating of these data and vetting of the same have been carried out by concerned states/UTs at different levels, namely, school, district and State/UT level using the online portals of Shagun, UDISE and Mid-Day Meal (MDM), created and maintained by the DoSEL, Ministry of Education. For the remaining 16 parameters, scores from National Achievement Survey (NAS) 2017 conducted by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) have been used in all the three PGIs.
“The PGI is expected to help states and UTs to pinpoint the gaps and accordingly prioritise areas for intervention to ensure that the school education system is robust at every level. At the same time it is expected to act as a good source of information for best practices followed by States and UTs which can be shared,” it added.