Introduction

On 7–8 July 2026, the Union Ministry of Education released the Performance Grading Index 2.0 (PGI 2.0) report for States/UTs and Districts for the year 2025–26, covering a school system that includes over 14.67 lakh schools, 1.03 crore teachers, and nearly 24.72 crore students. This is not a routine data release. It is, in effect, a national report card on whether India's massive investment in school education is translating into outcomes that matter for children — particularly those from poor, tribal, and marginalised communities.

The PGI 2.0 is significant because it arrives at a critical juncture: five years into the implementation of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, which promised to transform Indian education from rote memorisation toward competency-based, holistic learning. The question the report forces India to confront is whether the policy vision is landing in actual classrooms, especially in states and districts where ground-level realities are starkest.

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About the Topic

What is the Performance Grading Index?

The Performance Grading Index (PGI) was first introduced by the Ministry of Education (then Ministry of Human Resource Development) in 2017 as an evidence-based framework to measure and benchmark school education quality across states and union territories. Its core purpose was to shift the national conversation on education from inputs (how many schools were built, how much money was spent) to outcomes (are children learning?).

PGI 1.0 assessed states on a set of indicators primarily focused on enrollment, infrastructure, and governance. PGI 2.0, revamped in alignment with NEP 2020, was introduced to capture a more nuanced picture — one that emphasises learning quality, equity, and teacher development alongside infrastructure.

The Framework: Six Domains, 73 Indicators

The PGI 2.0 assesses every state and UT on a 1,000-point scale across 73 indicators clustered into two broad categories and six domains:

Category I — Outcomes:

1.  Learning Outcomes (240 points): Measures student achievement levels, competency attainment, and foundational literacy and numeracy. This is the most heavily weighted domain.
2.  Access to Education (80 points): Enrollment rates, retention, grade transitions, and mainstreaming of out-of-school children.

Category II — Governance & Management:  
3. Infrastructure & Facilities (190 points): Physical infrastructure including toilets, drinking water, electricity, libraries, computers, and digital access.  
4. Equity (260 points): Inclusive education metrics across gender, caste, disability, and rural-urban lines.  
5. Governance Processes (130 points): Administrative efficiency, data systems, compliance, and policy implementation.  
6. Teacher Education & Training (100 points): Teacher qualifications, professional development, vacancies, and training hours.

Data sources include UDISE+ (Unified District Information System for Education Plus), PARAKH Rashtriya Sarvekshan 2024, PM POSHAN portal, PRABAND portal, and the Vidyanjali platform.

National Findings (2025–26)

The 2025–26 report reveals a mixed national picture:

-   No state has yet reached the Daksh or Utkarsh tier. Chandigarh, the consistent top performer, remains in the Uttam-2 band with 703 points — indicating that even the best-performing jurisdiction has enormous headroom for improvement.
-   25 of 36 states and UTs improved their scores compared to the previous cycle. But improvement in scores does not automatically mean improvement in classrooms.
-   The quality gap remains alarming: approximately 60% of Grade I students struggle with basic addition, and around 50% of Grade III students cannot read a Grade I-level text — a crisis of foundational learning that has persisted despite heavy policy intervention.
-   Dropout rates remain structurally worrying: while primary-level retention stands at approximately 85.4%, this drops sharply to 45.6% at the higher secondary level — meaning more than half of children who begin school do not complete it.
-   India faces a shortage of over 1 million unfilled teacher positions across states, concentrated disproportionately in rural and tribal districts.
-   Only 38.5% of schools have functional computers, and the digital divide between urban and rural schools continues to widen despite DIKSHA platform investments.
-   The lowest-performing states — Meghalaya (417.9), Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram, Nagaland, and Bihar — are concentrated in the Northeast and Central India, revealing that geography and tribal demography continue to be systemic disadvantages.

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The OAS Prism: Multiple Perspectives

Constitutional & Legal Dimension

• Education in India occupies a carefully constructed constitutional architecture, the understanding of which is essential for any aspirant.
• Article 21A, inserted by the 86th Constitutional Amendment Act, 2002, makes free and compulsory education a Fundamental Right for children aged 6 to 14 years. This provision gave constitutional force to what was previously merely a directive, and led directly to the enactment of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009. Under the RTE Act, private unaided schools must reserve 25% of seats for economically weaker sections, no child can be detained or expelled before completing elementary education, and pupil-teacher ratios and infrastructure norms are legally mandated.
• Article 45 (Directive Principle of State Policy) directs the state to provide early childhood care and education to all children below the age of six — the foundation on which NIPUN Bharat's vision of foundational literacy and numeracy rests.
• Article 46 directs the state to promote the educational and economic interests of Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and Other Backward Classes — directly relevant to the Equity domain of PGI 2.0.
• Education is placed in the Concurrent List (List III, Entry 25) of the Seventh Schedule, meaning both Parliament and State Legislatures can legislate on it. This makes education a shared responsibility — a fact PGI 2.0 leverages by making state governments accountable for their own performance.
• The National Education Policy 2020 — while not a legislation — represents the most comprehensive policy overhaul since 1986. It restructures school education into the 5+3+3+4 framework (Foundational, Preparatory, Middle, Secondary stages), mandates mother-tongue instruction at the foundational level, emphasises competency-based assessment over rote examination, and envisions universal literacy and numeracy by 2026–27 through NIPUN Bharat. PGI 2.0's redesign directly tracks NEP 2020 implementation.

Economic Dimension

• India allocates approximately 4.5% of GDP to public education expenditure — still below the 6% target recommended by NEP 2020 and earlier by the Kothari Commission (1964–66). The Union Budget 2026 increased the allocation for school education under the Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan, reflecting the government's awareness that quality public schools are the most powerful lever for reducing inequality.
• The economic case for fixing school education is overwhelming. The World Bank estimates that "learning poverty" — the inability of a child to read a simple text by age 10 — costs economies up to 10% of lifetime earnings per child. When multiplied across the 24.72 crore children in India's school system, the macroeconomic stakes are incalculable. The PGI 2.0 data on learning outcomes is therefore not merely a pedagogical concern — it is a forecast of India's future productivity and demographic dividend.
• Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan, the central government's flagship integrated scheme covering pre-school to Class XII, channels funds to states for infrastructure, teacher training, and inclusive education. The PM POSHAN scheme (formerly the Mid-Day Meal Scheme) addresses the hunger-learning nexus by providing nutritious meals to children, thereby incentivising school attendance, particularly among the poor.
• PM SHRI (PM Schools for Rising India) aims to develop over 14,500 model schools across the country to demonstrate the full implementation of NEP 2020 — serving as exemplars of what quality public school education can look like.

Social Dimension

• The Equity domain of PGI 2.0 — worth 260 points — is specifically designed to capture how well states are serving children who are systematically disadvantaged: girls, children with disabilities, children from Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe communities, children in conflict-affected areas, and migrant children.
• India's progress on gender parity in school enrollment is genuine — girls now constitute nearly half of enrolled students at the elementary level. But gender parity in enrollment is not the same as gender equality in education. Adolescent girl dropout rates remain disproportionately high, driven by early marriage, distance to secondary schools, lack of separate toilet facilities, and domestic labour demands. The Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed, through cases interpreting Article 21A and the RTE Act, that school infrastructure for girls is not optional — it is constitutionally mandated.
• The intersection of caste, tribe, and poverty creates a particularly acute learning crisis in India's Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups (PVTGs). These communities — 75 in India, including 13 in Odisha — face the compounded disadvantage of geographic isolation, language barriers (their mother tongue is often neither Hindi nor English), and teacher absenteeism in remote posting. NIPUN Bharat's foundational literacy targets have a direct bearing on whether tribal children can access meaningful education.

Environmental Dimension

• Climate change has an underappreciated but growing impact on school education. Heatwaves, cyclones, and floods disrupt school calendars, destroy infrastructure, and force out-of-school periods that disproportionately affect the poorest families, who lack resources to buffer the disruption.
• Odisha, sitting on the eastern coast, is among India's most disaster-prone states — regularly affected by cyclones, floods, and droughts. The PGI-District framework's inclusion of School Safety & Child Protection as a domain reflects this reality. A school that is not designed to withstand a Category 3 cyclone is not just an infrastructure problem — it is an equity problem, because it is always the poorest children who live in the most exposed areas and who lose the most schooling when disasters strike.

Odisha Perspective

• The PGI 2.0 report for 2025–26 presents a nuanced picture of Odisha — one that demands honest analysis rather than either celebration or despair.

Odisha's Overall Performance:

-   Grade: Prachesta-2 (retained from previous cycle)
-   Score: 651.5 out of 1,000 (a slight decline from 655.2)
-   National standing: Among the middle-performing larger states

Challenges

1. The Learning Outcomes Crisis is Structural: PGI 2.0 is a measurement tool, not a solution. The fact that learning outcomes remain in the lowest tiers for many states — despite years of investment — suggests the problem is structural, rooted in teacher quality, classroom pedagogy, and socioeconomic barriers that cannot be fixed by an index alone.

2. Data Reliability Concerns: PGI 2.0 relies heavily on self-reported state data (UDISE+), which is susceptible to inflation. A state that reports high toilet coverage but has non-functional toilets, or high teacher attendance but with teachers who are doing administrative work rather than teaching, will score deceptively well on governance and infrastructure.

3. 300+ Point Gap Between Best and Worst: The nearly 300-point difference between Chandigarh (703) and Meghalaya (417.9) reveals a school education system that is deeply unequal along regional and historical lines. Without targeted fiscal equalisation and special category treatment for states facing structural disadvantages, the gap is unlikely to close organically.

4. Digital Divide Deepening: The DIKSHA platform and PM eVidya initiative presuppose internet connectivity and device access that most rural and tribal households do not have. Odisha's district-level digital scores confirm this. As the economy becomes increasingly digital, a school system that cannot deliver digital literacy to tribal and rural children is manufacturing future inequality.

5. Teacher Vacancy Crisis: One million unfilled teacher positions — concentrated in the most underserved districts — is a structural contradiction. Investment in school buildings, digital platforms, and curriculum reform means little when the classroom itself has no teacher.

6. NEP 2020 Implementation Gap: The gap between policy and practice remains wide. NEP 2020 calls for mother-tongue instruction at the foundational stage, but in tribal areas where the mother tongue is an oral language with no formal script or teaching material, implementation is extraordinarily complex. The policy vision is sound; the operational capacity to execute it in the hardest geographies is lagging.

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Way Forward

1. Prioritise Learning Outcomes Above All Else: The findings of NIPUN Bharat monitoring must be used to direct emergency interventions to districts — including in Odisha — where foundational literacy and numeracy targets are critically off-track. Every child who leaves Grade 3 without being able to read is a systemic failure that compounds with every subsequent year.

2. Fill Teacher Vacancies with Urgency: State governments, including Odisha, must treat teacher recruitment not as an administrative task but as a national emergency. The Kasturirangan Committee recommendations on teacher preparation — rigorous entrance standards, restructured B.Ed programmes, higher social recognition — must be operationalised without delay.

3. Reform Assessment to Drive Classroom Change: India's classroom assessment culture rewards memorisation over understanding. PARAKH (Performance Assessment, Review, and Analysis of Knowledge for Holistic Development) — the national assessment regulator created under NEP 2020 — must design assessments that actually measure the competencies PGI 2.0 tracks. Until assessment reform follows, pedagogy will not change.

4. Targeted Intervention for Tribal Districts: Districts like Rayagada in Odisha — and their counterparts in Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, and the Northeast — need a dedicated model of school education that accounts for language barriers, teacher deployment challenges, and community-school relationships. The Eklavya Model Residential Schools (EMRS) for tribal children are one such model that deserves significant scaling.

5. Leverage the 5T Transformation in Odisha: The Odisha government's 5T (Teamwork, Technology, Transparency, Transformation, and Time-Limit) School Transformation Programme has the right framework. Scaling it to systematically address the Learning Outcomes domain — through mentoring teachers, improving classroom pedagogy, and integrating digital resources — would be Odisha's most impactful next step.

6. Strengthen Data Governance: UDISE+ data quality must be independently audited. Third-party assessments, the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) model, and National Achievement Survey cycles must be institutionalised as cross-checks on self-reported state data so that PGI scores reflect what is actually happening in classrooms.

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Conclusion

The PGI 2.0 report for 2025–26 is ultimately a reminder that India's education story is one of remarkable progress and stubborn gaps existing simultaneously. Enrollment has been near-universalised. Girls are in school in numbers unimaginable a generation ago. The equity agenda has moved from policy rhetoric to measurable outcomes. These are genuine achievements.

But learning — the actual purpose of schooling — remains the unfinished frontier. No state has reached the Daksh grade. No district has cracked the code on making quality education accessible to every tribal, rural, and poor child. For Odisha, the path is clearer than for many: the foundation of equity and access has been built. What it now needs is a focused, urgent, data-driven war on learning poverty — one school, one district, one child at a time. That is a worthy challenge for a state and a nation aspiring to turn its demographic dividend into its greatest economic advantage.

Mains Question

"The Performance Grading Index 2.0 reveals that India has made significant strides in school access and equity, but the learning outcomes crisis remains the central unresolved challenge. In this context, critically examine the institutional, pedagogical, and socio-economic factors responsible for India's learning poverty, and suggest a comprehensive reform framework with special reference to tribal and rural districts of Odisha." (250 words)