Guwahati: The Ministry of Education has ranked Meghalaya as the lowest-performing state in the 2023–24 Performance Grading Index for Districts (PGI-D), which evaluates school education at the district level nationwide.
Among Meghalaya’s districts, East Khasi Hills earned the highest score with 212 out of 600 points, followed by East Jaintia Hills, Eastern West Khasi Hills, and Ri-Bhoi, each with 180 points. Other districts recorded similarly low scores: East Garo Hills (170), West Khasi Hills (169), West Jaintia Hills (168), South Garo Hills (168), West Garo Hills (167), South West Khasi Hills (166), and South West Garo Hills (162).
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North Garo Hills, with 155 points, ranked as the second-worst performing district in the country, ahead of only Longding in Arunachal Pradesh, which scored 145 points.
In contrast, Chandigarh topped the national list, followed by Punjab, Delhi, Gujarat, and Odisha. The Ministry also placed Kerala, Daman and Diu, Haryana, Goa, Maharashtra, and Rajasthan among the top performers.
The Department of School Education and Literacy (DSEL) has used the PGI-D to measure school education performance consistently since 2017-18. The index uses 74 indicators grouped into six broad categories, such as Learning Outcomes, Classroom Transactions, Infrastructure, Safety, Digital Learning, and Governance, all carrying a combined weightage of 600 points. These categories further divide into 11 domains to offer a comprehensive assessment.
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According to a senior ministry official, the government designed PGI-D as a tool to drive transformational changes in school education by grading all districts on a uniform scale. Each grade in the PGI-D represents a specific percentage band, with “Utkarsh” being the highest level, reserved for districts that score over 90%.
The Ministry categorizes states and Union Territories such as Puducherry, Himachal Pradesh, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, and West Bengal as average performers in the latest index.