Goa scores lower than neighbouring regions in school education index

Panaji: In the Union education ministry’s performance grading index (PGI) for school education released for 2019-20, Goa has scored the lowest among its neighbouring regions. Goa has landed in the grade-II category, with a score of 783 out of 1,000 points.
This has put Goa in the league of Telangana (772) and Jharkhand (790). Though Goa was the best-performing among smaller states, it was far behind Kerala (901), Maharashtra (869), and Karnataka (813), who gained a higher ranking.
The PGI was introduced recently by the ministry as ‘a tool to provide insights on the status of school education in states and UTs’.
Goa lost the most points on the parameters of ‘learning outcomes & quality’ and ‘governance processes’.
On the ‘learning outcomes & quality’ parameter, Goa scored 132 out of 180. The indicators in this domain mainly deal with the scores of students in language and mathematics in Classes III, V and VIII of government and government-aided schools. Goa students’ scores have been found unimpressive in successive national assessment surveys.
On the ‘governance processes’ parameter, Goa’s score was 229 out of 360. In fact, this is the domain which has been attributed the highest weightage in the PGI evaluation.
“This domain deals with indicators relating to management and administration of school education like teacher training, teacher management, etc. The fact that this domain has maximum weightage for the PGI underscores its importance in determining the performance of the school education system in states and UTs,” the ministry’s report states.
The parameters on which Goa performed well were ‘access’ (scoring 76 out of 80), ‘infrastructure & facilities’ (137 out of 150) and ‘equity’ (209 out of 230).
While ‘access’ relates to net enrolment ratio at the elementary and secondary level, retention rate, mainstreaming of out of school children, etc, ‘infrastructure & facilities’ includes functional toilets, availability of clean drinking water, science and computer laboratories, libraries, etc.
‘Equity’ deals with comparative performance of learning outcomes of various categories of students like SC/S T, rural and urban areas, girls and boys.