A majority of districts across all 38 States and Union Territories in India are far from achieving the goal of digital learning as they failed to provide a necessary learning environment to students. Of the 766 districts, nearly 500 districts have hit rock bottom in the combined Performance Grading Index (PGI) for the years 2020-21 and 2021-22, released by the Ministry of Education (MoE) last week. “Access to smartphones and the Internet still remains a major challenge in many parts of the country. In rural areas, the control of the phone remains with the father and even one GB of data per day is not sufficient,” Ankit Arora, founder, Saarthi Education, told FE Education.
States such as Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, among others face an urgent need to upgrade their facilities in digital learning with scores as low as one and two out of 50, the report stated. Meanwhile, prominent states such as Delhi, Assam, Gujrat, Haryana and Maharashtra could manage to score upto 30 out of 50. Only districts in Punjab scored the highest at 40 in digital learning, the report showed.
Ironically, post the pandemic these numbers have dropped across districts in most states, data revealed. “We have to look at this from a geographical point of view to know the size of the number of schools we are talking about. For example, in Madhya Pradesh we have around one lakh government schools but in Punjab we have about 15,000 to 20,000 government schools, which means MP requires more efforts and investment to digitally equip its schools,” Abhishek Dubey, founder, CEO, Muskaan Dreams, said.
Furthermore, in terms of year-on-year improvement 10 districts have shown over 20 % improvement in score and 74 districts showed over 10% improvement in scores during 2021-22 as compared to 2019-20. It is important to note that hundreds of districts made over 20% improvement in infrastructure, facilities, and student entitlements scores just by jumping two grades in the index. Experts believe the government needs to put greater emphasis on digitising the school ecosystem by spending on both infrastructural needs as well as training of teachers.
The drop in digital learning across these states comes at a time when the budget allocation for Digital India has decreased by 37% to Rs 4,795.24 crore for the year 2023-24. Last year, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) allocated an actual outlay of Rs 7,603.5 crore for the initiative. Nevertheless, the funds allocated for ramping up digital initiatives during the pandemic were considerably high at Rs 6,703.5 crore. “This drop in investment for Digital India could be attributed to lack of evidence showing any significant impact on learning outcome due to e-learning. At this point, the government has no return on investment and hence the funds can be expected to fall,” Arora opined.
Daksh is the highest achievable grade in PGI-D, which is for districts scoring more than 90% of the total points in that category or overall. Utkarsh is for the district having PGI score of 81% to 90%, Ati-Uttam: 71% to 80%, Uttam: 61% to 70%, Prachesta-1: 51% to 60%, Prachesta-2: 41% to 50%, Prachesta-3: 31% to 40%, Akanshi-1: 21% to 30%, and Akanshi-2: 11% to 20%. The last one, namely Akanshi-3 is for scores upto 10%.
The districts were assessed under six major categories which included- Outcomes, Effective Classroom Transaction, Infrastructure Facilities and Student’s Entitlements, School Safety and Child Protection, Digital Learning and Governance Process.