Progress of UDISE+ 2022
The Ministry of Education, through the PIB on December 30th, 2022, has shared the progress of the Department of School Education & Literacy, including the UDISE+, which is now managed by it through the NIC from the year 2018-19. The press release presents impressive activities carried out during 2022. Some of the UDISE+ achievements are listed below:
UDISE+ emerged as the one-stop shop for citizens of the Country to acquire an overview of the school education system with credible facts;
- There is improvement in the quality and credibility of the data provided by the schools, which helped to draw precise inferences; and
- Enabled the States/UTs to undertake evidence-based planning and design appropriate interventions to improve the system.
UDISE+ Data Collection during 2022
The NIC, through the Department of School & Literacy, collects data on school parameters through UDISE+ every year on September 30th from mostly recognized schools. In addition, a few unrecognized private unaided schools and Madaras are also covered.
The system so developed is online in nature and has many built-in checks, which are internally verified at different levels by the staff engaged either in UDISE or Samagra Shiksha Samiti. As of now, there is no third-party verification, like on the basis of earlier 5 percent random sample checking of data.
As there are always fingers raised on the quality and consistency of data, especially sudden jumps and declines in enrolment data, the Ministry may like to launch on pan-India basis verification of UDIE+ data immediately after the process of data collection is over by the third party.
It is further mentioned that because of the COVID-19 pandemic, schools were closed between April 2020 to January 2022. However, the UDISE+ 2020-21 data was collected on a war footing which was initiated soon after COVID was over and released data quickly on April 26th, 2022. Following this, UDISE+ 2021-22 data collection was also taken up, completed, and released on November 3rd, 2022, in a record time.
The release further says that during the year, Performance Grading Index was also undertaken and completed, but it seems that still the PGI is not computed for the current year, and all states are yet to compute district-specific PGI. It would be of interest to study how PGI is being used as an input to annual plan formulation under Samagra Shiksha.
The release also mentions that individual student data is being collected as part of UDISE+ 2022-23 (as of September 30th, 2022). Without strengthening digit access to schools and how SDMIS is being handled, the release is silent on it. Hope, additional efforts are made to ensure that data entry of UDISE+ 2022-23 takes place from the school to ensure that the process of data collection is not delayed.
During the year, the Ministry released the digital version of the Statistical Profile of School Education in India through UDISE+ 2022-23 Booklet and provided users online access to download tables and even raw data. With this, users can now download data during 2018-19 to 2021-22.
The release further says that the Department collates UDISE+ enrolment data with the enrolment data it received from the Ministries of Women and Child Development, Skill Development, from its own Department of Higher Education & NIOS and timely submitted to the UNESCO Institute for Statistics to fulfill the global commitment much before the deadline, i.e., March 31st, 2023 which is a step needs to be appreciated. Hope that India’s efforts will be reflected in the forthcoming global report.
It is hoped that the Department will continue to engage in such activities and may also bring new publications based on UDISE+ data in the forthcoming year.
