New Delhi: Beating several states like Delhi, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu, Punjab has emerged as the top-performing state on various education and health-related indicators, according to a study released by the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM) Friday.
Punjab topped all key indicators like educational infrastructure, access to education, basic health, learning outcomes and governance.
The report, State of Foundational Literacy and Numeracy, was released at ‘The Indian Dialog’, an event organised by the Institute of Competitiveness and US-Asia Technology Center, Stanford University. It was prepared by the Institute for Competitiveness — the Indian wing of the Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness at Harvard Business School.
Delhi, Goa, Maharashtra, Jammu and Kashmir, Kerala, Rajasthan, Sikkim, Tamil Nadu and Puducherry were ranked as high-performing states and UTs. Meghalaya, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, Nagaland, Telangana, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Arunachal Pradesh and Ladakh were among those that underperformed.
The primary focus of the report was to capture the role of language in education and focus on improving learning outcomes using appropriate assessments for children in the early years of learning.
EAC chairman Bibek Debroy wrote in the report’s foreword, “This is the second report that the Institute for Competitiveness has done on the State of Foundational Literacy and Numeracy. Education is a continuum. For India to perform better on development aspirations, both health and educational indicators need to improve and both have taken a knock because of the pandemic. Within that continuum of education, foundational literacy (interpreted as under-10) is the most important link in the chain…”
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Performance of states
Punjab, which was also the best performer in the National Achievement Survey-2021 released last year, scored the highest on the educational infrastructure and learning outcomes, but compared to other parameters, underperformed when it came to governance.
Rajasthan scored well on learning outcomes but fared poorly with access to education. Sikkim performed high on educational infrastructure but lagged on the governance indicator.
Among the underperforming states, Meghalaya scored “poor” on educational infrastructure, learning outcomes and governance, while Telangana lagged on governance and learning outcomes. Uttar Pradesh performed poorly on basic health and governance.
About the report
The report compares states on 36 indicators across five key domains — educational infrastructure, access to education, basic health, learning outcomes and governance.
The primary data for these indicators were taken from various sources, including the Ministry of Education’s UDISE index, the National Family Health Survey-5, all Budgets from 2019 onwards and the National Achievement Survey 2021.
The other sources include data from the National Sample Survey Organisation’ survey 2017-18 and the data from the report on Foundational Numeracy and Literacy released by the NCERT in 2022 titled ‘National Curriculum Framework for Foundational Stage’.
The methodology adopted to assign weights in the index was Principal Component Analysis (PCA).
States were categorised into different tiers based on the level of development to help form a better analysis. Further, they were classified based on their population of children aged 10 and below.
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Recommendations by the report
The report listed several recommendations for states to improve learning outcomes and assessments.
For the NCERT Survey on Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN), the report said, “The sample size needs to improve. Simultaneously, it will be important to have data on teachers that help schools focus on improving their classroom practices and make well-informed decisions.”
In addition, it also recommended that the language of instruction for children at an early age should be the one they are most familiar with. Teaching a language that is unfamiliar to them can put them at a disadvantage in learning the basic foundation.
Another area highlighted by the report was the need for increasing digital penetration across the country so that students can learn at home. This would in turn also enable parents to facilitate at-home learning.
For improvement of FLN measuring indicators, it said, “Currently, many of the indicators taken up for constructing the FLN Index are related to primary education. Therefore, appropriate data related to FLN outcome-based indicators must be embedded and evaluated within the states/UTs education system with a well-defined pedagogical framework.”
(Edited by Richa Mishra)
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