Districts in Nagaland have shown improvement in school education in the Performance Grading Index for Districts (PGI-D) combined report for 2020-21 & 2021-22 released by the Department of School Education and Literacy (DoSE&L), Ministry of Education on Sunday. It graded 742 districts during 2020-21 and 748 districts during 2021-22 across the states and Union territories.

Of the 16 districts in Nagaland, 11 districts were assessed while the new districts – Tseminyu, Noklak, Niuland, Shamator and Chümoukedima districts – have not been included individually in the list.

Kohima District scored the most in school education among the other districts with 311 followed by Mokokchung district with 301 points for 2021-22. The two are also the best ranked the districts, being graded Prachesta-1 which is the fifth grade.

The PGI-D structure comprises of total weight age of 600 points across 83 indicators, which are grouped under six categories – 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 –  Learning Outcomes and Quality (LO), Access Outcomes (AO), Teacher Availability and Professional Development Outcomes (TAPDO), Learning Management (LM), Learning Enrichment Activities (LEA), Infrastructure, Facilities, Student Entitlements (IF&SE), School Safety and Child Protection (SS&CP), Digital Learning (DL), Funds convergence and utilization (FCV), Enhancing CRCs Performance (CRCP), Attendance Monitoring Systems (AMS) and School Leadership Development (SLD).

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PGI-D grades the districts into ten grades – Highest achievable Grade is Daksh, which is for Districts scoring more than 90% of the total points in that category or overall. “Utkarsh” category is for districts with score between 81-90 per cent followed by “Ati-Uttam” (71-80 per cent), “Uttam” (61-70 per cent), “Prachesta-I” (51-60 per cent), “Prachesta-II” (41-50 per cent) and “Prachesta III” (31-40 per cent). The lowest grade in PGI-D is called “Akanshi-3” which is for scores up to 10 per cent of the total points.

Among the Nagaland districts, Mon scored the least points with 251 in 2021-22 report, which is still an improvement from that of 2020-21 when it scored 238, a point higher than Tuensang.

There are no districts in the country figuring in the top two grades “Daksh” and “Utkarsh” in the 2021-22 index. There were three districts in “Utkarsh” in the pre-Covid index report (2018-19), all coming from Rajasthan.

Kerala’s Kollam and Thiruvananthapuram were the highest performing districts in school education during 2020-21 followed by Kannur and Thrissur, according to the index.

Among the best performing districts in 2020-21, maximum are from Rajasthan (26) followed by Gujarat (22) and Punjab (19). All nine districts of Delhi have figured in the “Ati Uttam” category.

Kohima district climbed four places to top the list in 2021-22, while Phek district fell to the seventh spot after topping in 2020-21. Phek’s points decreased from 290 in 2020-21 to 276 in 2021-22. Slight improvement in school education has also been reflected in Wokha but with 289 points in 2021-22, it is yet to get back to its pre-pandemic level. Wokha had earlier scored 298 in 2018-19.

DoSE&L devised Performance Grading Index (PGI) for States and released report for the reference years 2017-18 to 2020-21. Based on the success of State PGI, 83-indicator based PGI for District (PGI-D) has been designed to grade the performance of all districts in school education. The data is filled by districts through online portal.

MoE stated that the PGI-D is expected to help the state education departments to identify gaps at the district level and improve their performance in a decentralized manner. The indicator-wise PGI score shows the areas where a district needs to improve. PGI-D report for 2018-19 and 2019-20 has been released so far the current one is combined report for 2020-21 & 2021-22.

(With inputs from PTI)