States to be Ranked on the Basis of Education

NITI Aayog is holding the first set of consultation meeting today with northern states and Union territories to discuss about developing the educational standards for schools in the states.

What is NITI Aayog?

NITI stands for National Institution for Transforming India. It is a Government of India policy think-tank established by the Narendra Modi government to replace the Planning Commission.

In order to foster quality education of schools in the country, the Union government has announced ranking of states as per their educational standards. This move is expected to bring out innovative and cost effective ways for good education and help the country share the best practices. The first ranking results will be out coming June 2017.

The Human Resource Development (HRD) Ministry and government's think tank NITI Aayog together have formulated School Education Quality Index (SEQI). SEQI has a set of 34 parameters to evaluate the rank across five domains such as learning outcomes, access outcomes, equity outcomes, governance process and strucural reforms implemented by the states.

"SEQI will measure annual state level scores on a composite index and report annual improvement of states along key domains of education quality," read NITI Aayog's letter to the HRD Ministry.

The letter also said that although there is an index level that manipulate's states' outcome, it will not be used to strictly compare the development of the states as much as their improvement separately, as the index level is based on a cumulative progress over the past years.

"This will enable states that are effective in improving key outcomes to be recognised and their successful policies can be adopted in other states," the letter added.

The total score for the index will be 1000, with learning outcome alone carrying a score of 600 while the rest have 100 points each. The National Council for Education Research and Training will conduct a survey annually in order to calculate the ranks.