By Bhogtoram Mawroh
A few days ago, the Ministry of Education, Department of School Education & Literacy released the Performance Grading Index 2.0 for States/UTs, 2022-23 & 2023-24. This report caused a lot of commotion in the state because the state ranked among the worst performing nationwide. Understandably, this has led to the critics of the government to label it as a total failure of the Conrad Sangma-led MDA Government. The Education Minister, Rakkam Sangma, on his part, tried to defend the government by pointing at technical issues which lead to faulty analysis. For example, according to him, the “PGI still penalises primary schools in Shillong for not having electric fans or power connections, even though they operate from a single building”. So, what he’s basically saying is that the indicators chosen are not appropriate for conducting the assessment. This argument is flawed because the assessment uses the chosen indicators for all states. So, if it penalizes Meghalaya, it should penalise other states as well. If this indicator has resulted in the state losing 20 points, others should also lose similar points. So, the final scores will still result in Meghalaya having the same or similar points, thus essentially changing nothing. So, it’s not a very convincing argument. Still, it is important to actually look at the actual report and see the process of assessment and where Meghalaya didn’t do well, which resulted in the low ranking they got.
The PGI 2.0 is based on 73 indicators across 2 categories, viz., Outcome and Governance & Management, containing 6 domains, viz., Learning Outcomes, Access, Infrastructure and Facilities, Equity, Governance Processes, and Teachers and Education Training. Using Meghalaya’s lowest score (417.9) as a basis, the report divided the states into ten groups of equal intervals. So, as much as it is about the actual score a state receives, it is more important to look at the change as well, i.e., has the score increased from the last assessment and by how much compared to other states. This will be a much more accurate assessment rather than just the score per se.
The report interestingly shows that the first four groups (Daskh, Utkarsh, Atti-Utam, and Uttam) contained no states, while only Chandigarh appeared in the next group. Akanshi-1 (521-580), the 3rd to last group, includes a maximum of 14 states. The second last group, i.e., Akanshi-2 (461-520), has 10 ten states and all the North-East states, except Sikkim, are in this group. Meghalaya is the lone member of the bottom-most group, Akanshi-3 and the gap between it and the state with the least point in the Akanshi-2 group is just over 50 points. What this shows is that the gap between Meghalaya and the other states at least till Akanshi-1, is not very high and it is possible to bridge in the next four to five years, provided the state grows by at least 40-50 points every assessment year. But is the state improving or regressing? Now, that is the most important question.
When one looks at the progress at PGI scores between 2022-2023 vis-à-vis 2023-2024, something very interesting is being noticed. The PGI score for Meghalaya in 2022-2023 was 410, which increased to almost 418 in 2023-2024, an increase of 16 points, making them the 15th among the 24 states that register a positive gain from the previous assessment. This increase, though much less than 40–50 points, still exceeds that of Tripura, Assam, Manipur, and Sikkim. So, actually Meghalaya has seen an improvement while states like Jharkhand, Tamil Nadu, Ladakh, Mizoram, Kerala, Uttarakhand, Bihar, Karnataka, West Bengal, Lakshadweep, Chhattisgarh and Andaman and Nicobar Islands have seen a drop in their scores. So, comparatively, the situation could have been much worse. But there is a caveat.
In 2022-2023, Meghalaya along with Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland were the three states that were in the bottom category, i.e., Akanshi-3. The latter two, like Meghalaya, saw an increase in their scores; but because they already had comparatively higher scores, and they saw an over 20 points increase (as against Meghalaya’s 16 points increase), they could get out of the bottom and become part of the second last category, i.e., Akanshi-3. So, the problem for Meghalaya was the low base from which they were starting and they would have to accumulate over 50 points to show any discernible improvement in their rankings. It is important to keep in mind that Delhi with 44 points achieved the highest gain in points. So, it was always going to be very difficult for Meghalaya to show drastic improvement in such a short period. This is not an excuse for the low point’s tally, especially when the NPP-led MDA government is now in its second term. Whatever legacy issues may have plagued the sector, there should have been some progress till now. To achieve true improvement, we need to determine precisely where the state has improved and declined since the last assessment, thus identifying the critical areas demanding urgent action.
The country comprises 36 geographical units (states and union territories), and they are each assessed in terms of score increases or decreases since the 2022-2023 assessment period. Of the six domains, there is no new data for Learning Outcomes (LO), so there has been no change in it, and of the remaining five, Meghalaya saw an increase in their score in four of the five domains. The domain where the state saw a decline in score is equity, which is concerned with parity in educational attainment between different social, economic and gender groups. Meghalaya is a state where over 80% of its population is indigenous with a similar figure of people living in the rural areas. So, to find that the gap between the different categories has increased is a shocking finding. Although I don’t have access to the raw data of the individual indicators, this means that students belonging to marginalized groups, like ST, SC, female, and those staying in rural areas are actually doing much worse than the previous assessment period.
As for the domains where Meghalaya has seen an increase in the scores, the state ranks 22nd out of the 30 states in Infrastructure & Facilities (IF), 24th out of 32 in Teacher Education & Training (TE&T), which are not very encouraging. This means they have just basically scrapped through. The Education Minister has cited the inappropriateness of the indicators under Infrastructure & Facilities (IF) as an excuse for blaming the low scores. But actually, according to the data, the state has seen an improvement in this domain. So, it’s very confusing how this can be the reason for the low scores. The Teacher Education & Training (TE&T) is concerned with the quality of teachers and although we do see a slight increase in the scores under this domain, we can agree that there’s a lot of effort which is required to improve the training of teachers. We should connect this to job security, but predictably, the neo-liberal mindset running the country’s and state’s education systems will not allow it.
The domains where one can appreciate the improvement are Access (A) (9th out of 12 states) and Governance Processes (GP) (6th out of 21 states). The first is about retaining children in schools and considering the high-dropout rate being a historical problem for the state, it is an enormous achievement. The domain of Governance Processes (GP) has a lot of indicators which range from student-teacher ratio, availability of key officials in the school and funding, among others. If one were to be objective about the data, except these two domains, the state is seriously lagging in the other three domains, especially on equity which is very disconcerting because it hints at the rising inequality in the state which will have serious political implications for the state.
The state has to gain at least 40-50 points every year for the next few years to get out of the bottom. This appears to be a hard task considering that it faces challenges in more than half of the domains which are used to measure the performance of the states. But behind the scores, there is also a human cost which the poor and the marginalized are already paying. If things don’t improve soon and fast, it may lead to serious problems in the future, because you will have many people who are unprepared for the job market and many of them will be those who belong to the marginalized groups in the state, who incidentally are the majority. So, it’s a dangerous situation.
(The views expressed in the article are those of the author and do not reflect in any way his affiliation to any organisation or institution)