Education Recent Initiatives: NITI Aayog

Current Initiatives in the Field of Education 2023

Aspirational Districts Program: NITI Aayog’s Initiative for Holistic Development

Model Village Action Plan within the framework of the NITI Aayog Aspirational District Plan: Exemplary Set of Indicators

Government of India has initiated many programmes in the past under Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan Programme and now under Samagra Shiksha amongst which indices computed by the NITI Aayog for school education sector in the recent initiations past is the most prominent ones. In the past NIEPA also computed Educational Development Index (EDI) during 2005-06 to 2015-16 which were later discontinued on the direction of the Ministry of HRD.

During this period, an index one each for the primary and upper primary level of education based on a set of 24 parameters were computed state-wise. The indicators used were largely based on the data generated through the U-DISE imitative of the Government of India details of which are presented below.

The latest index computed by the NITI Aayog (Performance Grading Index & School Education Quality Index) is based on 2017-18 U-DISE data; incidentally the year after which the U-DISE is dislocated in the Ministry of Education. U-DISE is renamed by the Ministry of HRD/MoE as U-DISE+ but the 2018-19 full data is not yet available in the public domain. Through the U-DISE initiative, time-lag in the educational data reduce drastically from earlier 7 to 8 years to only an year but the same after acquisition by the Ministry has raised by almost three years.

By now U-DISE 2019-20 data must have been available in the public domain but in the absence of latest data, annual work plans appraised by the Project Approval Board are based on the outdated 2017-18 data for the last two years. One of the other significant achievements lost recent initiations is easy access to U-DISE raw data. It may be observed that not a single of the 14-publications based on the U-DISE data has brought out; the last such publication available in the public domain is School Education in India:

Revolutionizing Education: NITI Aayog’s Vision for a Bright Future 2023

U-DISE Flash Statistics, 2016-17 and the same for the year 2017-18 is ready with NIEPA but for the unknown reasons the same is yet to see the light of the day. In the absence of the latest data, both PGI and SEQI computed by the NITI Aayog are latest available for 2017-18.

For details, please visit the following links:

Performance Grading Index (PGI) was also initiated by the NITI Aayog and the same was computed by it based on 2017-18 data. In the subsequent year, 2018-19, the same was computed by the Department of School Education & Literacy, Ministry of Education in February 2020 even when most of the states were still finalizing U-DISE 2018-19 data? which means that PGI 2018-19 is provisional in nature and no meaningful conclusions can be drawn based on it. It is hoped that DoSE&L will soon come out with the PGI 2018-19 based on the final U-DISE+ 2018-19 data.