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Maharashtra: Unwarranted euphoria

EducationWorld December 2022 | Education News Magazine
Maharashtra — india’s most industrialised state which accounts for almost 25 per­cent of the country’s annual industrial production — has experienced huge political upheavals in recent times. On June 30, the Shiv Sena, Nationalist Congress Party and Congress coalition government which had assumed office in 2019 was toppled in a coup engi­neered by the BJP which had ruled Maharashtra for a full term (2014-19) in alliance with the Shiv Sena. With leaders of all political parties engaged in horse-trading and plots and con­spiracies, education of the state’s 22.5 million school-going children who had just emerged from the prolonged Co­vid lockdown of all education institu­tions has been on the backburner. Therefore news that under the Performance Grading Index (PGI) 2020-21, released on November 3 by the Union education ministry, Maha­rashtra together with Kerala and Pun­jab are the country’s top-ranked states for K-12 education countrywide has generated euphoria within the state government’s education ministry. In­troduced in 2017-18, PGI measures the performance of states/Union ter­ritories on “a uniform scale to catalyse transformational change in the field of school education”. Data for compiling the index is drawn from the Unified District Infor­mation System for Education, 2021, National Achievement Survey 2017, MDM (midday meal) portal and data provided by states/UTs. Information gathered from these sources is ana­lysed to construct PGI which grades states according to scores awarded under the parameters of learning out­comes, access, infrastructure and fa­cility, equity and governance process. States are awarded grades 1-10 with states scoring over 950 points award­ed Grade I status and those scoring less than 551 Level 10 status. In PGI 2020-21, none of India’s 29 states are awarded Level I grade. However six states — Kerala, Pun­jab, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, and the Union ter­ritory of Chandigarh — have been awarded Grade II (scores 901-950) with Kerala, Punjab, and Maharash­tra awarded the highest score of 928. Although there is understandable euphoria in the education ministry in Maharashtra about the exalted status awarded to the state’s school education system, experienced aca­demics are cynical. “While PGI provides a useful picture of the relative health of the school education system in various states, this annual exercise provides a macro perspective. To reform the school system, more time, resources and personnel need to be invested,” says Rishikesh B.S, pro­fessor of education at Azim Premji University, Bengaluru. Other studies of children’s learning outcomes indicate that Maharashtra is less than an out-performer. Accord­ing to the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2021, published by the highly-respected Pratham Educa­tion Foundation, during the Covid-19 pandemic induced lockdown, only 50 percent of households in the state (pop.115 million) received learning materials for children at home. Moreover according to ASER 2019, which measured the early years learning of classes I-III children in the last year before the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020, 31 percent of class III children in rural primaries were unable to read and/or comprehend class I textbooks and 14 percent couldn’t recognise numerals 1-9. Following the closure of schools statewide for
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