No district in top 2 grades of school performance index, finds Ministry report

New Delhi: The performance of schools in India was adversely affected during the pandemic years, says a report published by the Ministry of Education on Sunday as no district has been able to attain the top two grades under the Performance Grading Index (PGI) in the last two years,

The report was prepared by the Department of School Education and Literacy under the union ministry of Education and assessed the performance of the school education system at the district level through the index based on a host of parameters.

However, no district in India could bag the top two grades – Daksh and Utkarsh – in either 2020-21 or 2021-22. Daksh is for Districts scoring more than 90% of the total points in any category or overall categories, and Utkarsh is for the district having PGI score of 81% to 90%. The ministry, in its report, said that the grading implies that “there is ample scope for the districts to further improve their performance in future years.” The ministry said in its report that the covid pandemic years and learning outcomes based on National Achievement Survey-2021 have impacted the performance.

After the top two grades is the Ati-Uttam grade for districts earning 71% to 80% scores. From Karnataka, 13 districts got the Ati-Uttam grade in 2020-21. This includes Dharwad, Belagavi Chikkodi, Gadag, Belagavi, Uttara Kannada, Bengaluru Rural, Koppal, Chitradurga, Haveri, Hassan, Uttara Kannada Sirsi , Bagalkot and Kodagu. In 2021-22, while no districts got the Ati-Uttam grade, 22 districts got the Uttam grade.

Year wise performance analysis of districts also revealed that 79 districts made consistent improvement in the scores in the last four years – 2018-19 to 2021-22. In addition to that, 25 districts consistently performed poorly during the same period. “Inspite of Covid pandemic at its peak in 2021-22, 290 districts have made notable improvement in their performance when compared 2019-20 (pre-pandemic) with 2021-22,” the report said.

Over 14.9 lakh schools, 95 lakh teachers, and 26.5 crore students from varied socio-economic backgrounds are assessed across 83 indicators, which are grouped under six categories, which are weighted on over 600 point