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SHILLONG, JUNE 19: Meghalaya has come out as the worst-performing state in the Ministry of Education’s recent Performance Grading Index (PGI) 2.0, which assesses school education quality across Indian states and Union Territories. The report, for both 2022–23 and 2023–24, assesses performance on six main domains: learning outcomes and quality, access, infrastructure and facilities, equity, governance processes, and teacher education and training. A state or UT was graded on a 1,000-point scale.
The PGI 2.0 also seeks to become a benchmarking instrument to promote school education improvements through evaluating performance against a standardized scale. The PGI was meant to spur transformational change in the education sector and facilitate evidence-based decision-making at the district as well as state levels, according to a senior ministry official.
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States and UTs were ranked into 10 performance grades, with the highest being Level 1 or ‘Daksh’ (951–1,000 points) and the lowest being Level 10 or ‘Akanshi-3’ (401–460 points). The report states that none of the states and UTs attained the top four bands of performance, and the highest-scoring entity was Chandigarh with a score of 703, which was ranked in the fifth band, ‘Prachesta-1’.
Meghalaya, which scored 417.9 in 2023–24, was the sole state in the 10th and lowest performance band. This is an improvement from its 2022–23 score of 401.6 but continues to make it the weakest performer in the nation.
While the overall dismal assessment, the report added, 24 states and UTs had better scores in 2023–24 than in the previous year. Others like Bihar, Tamil Nadu, Jharkhand, Uttarakhand, and West Bengal worsened their performance.
At the learning outcome level, graded the most significant domain, Chandigarh, Punjab, and Puducherry achieved the sixth performance band (‘Prachesta-2’), whereas the majority of the states performed below them. Regarding access to education, Odisha topped the rankings, entering the top band (‘Daksh’), with ten states in the ‘Utkarsh’ band, such as Goa, Telangana, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu.
The infrastructure sector had Chandigarh as the only state in the ‘Ati Uttam’ category (821–880 points), while Delhi and Dadra and Nagar Haveli found themselves in the ‘Uttam’ band (761–820). On the positive side, the equity sector had all states in the uppermost three bands, indicating fairly even access and prospects for this sector.
The results coincide with a renewed focus by Meghalaya’s state government on upgrading educational infrastructure. However, the PGI findings emphasize continued weaknesses in core areas of education and the need for immediate reforms and consistent attention to address them and improve learning outcomes and system quality across the state.
