The Department of School Education and Literacy (DoSE&L), under the Ministry of Education, has unveiled the Performance Grading Index for Districts (PGI-D) combined report for the academic years 2020-21 and 2021-22. The PGI-D serves as an assessment tool for evaluating the performance of the school education system at the district level, offering a comprehensive analysis through an index.

India boasts one of the world’s largest education systems, comprising approximately 14.9 lakh schools, 95 lakh teachers, and nearly 26.5 crore students from diverse socio-economic backgrounds. In a bid to evaluate the performance of states, DoSE&L introduced the Performance Grading Index (PGI) and released reports covering the years 2017-18 to 2020-21. Building on the success of the state-level PGI, a district-level PGI with 83 indicators has been devised to grade the performance of all districts in school education. Districts fill in the data through an online portal. The PGI-D is expected to aid state education departments in identifying gaps at the district level and enhancing performance through decentralized efforts. The PGI-D’s indicator-wise scores pinpoint areas where districts need improvement. Previous reports have been released for 2018-19 and 2019-20, while the current release combines the data for 2020-21 and 2021-22.

The PGI-D structure assigns a total weightage of 600 points to 83 indicators, which are categorized under six key areas: Outcomes, Effective Classroom Transaction, Infrastructure Facilities & Student’s Entitlements, School Safety & Child Protection, Digital Learning, and Governance Process. These categories further break down into 12 domains, such as Learning Outcomes and Quality, Access Outcomes, Teacher Availability and Professional Development Outcomes, Learning Management, Learning Enrichment Activities, Infrastructure, Facilities, Student Entitlements, School Safety and Child Protection, Digital Learning, Funds Convergence and Utilization, Enhancing CRCs Performance, Attendance Monitoring Systems, and School Leadership Development.

The PGI-D assigns districts into ten grades. The highest achievable grade is Daksh, awarded to districts that score over 90% of the total points in a category or overall. On the other hand, the lowest grade in PGI-D is called Akanshi-3, designated for scores up to 10% of the total points. The ultimate objective of PGI-D is to help districts prioritize areas for intervention in school education and strive for the highest grade.

The PGI-D combined report for 2020-21 and 2021-22 can be accessed on the official website of the Ministry of Education at https://www.education.gov.in/statistics-new?shs_term_node_tid_depth=396&Apply=Apply.