BHUBANESWAR: Odisha improved its rank by six positions in the school education quality index for 2016-17 released by the Niti Aayog on Monday leaving behind Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka and reached seventh position in overall rankings.
The State gained by 12.4 percentage point to reach 60.23 per cent in overall performance in 2016-17 compared to 47.78 per cent in 2015-16, the base year. Odisha was in the 13th position for overall performance in 2015-16. The states and union territories were divided into three groups - large states, small states and UTs. Odisha has been placed in the group of large states.
According to the report, Odisha improved its performance by 18.51 per cent in the category of governance processes aiding outcomes from 43.42 per cent in 2015-16 to 61.93 per cent in 2016-17. The governance process aiding outcomes consider factors covering student-teacher attendance, administrative adequacy, training, accountability and transparency while reaching its conclusions.
Odisha improved its position in other categories also. In the category access outcomes, the State improved from 65.12 per cent in 2015-16 to 69.55 per cent in 2016-17. In the equity outcomes category, Odisha improved from 47.84 per cent in 2015-16 to 53.42 per cent in 2016-17. However, in the category of infrastructure and facilities for outcomes, the State’s performance was down by 1.17 per cent from 27.1 per cent in 2015-16 to 25.84 per cent in 2016-17.
The report maintained that the States’ overall performance may hide variations in their performance on the underlying categories. Of 20 large states, 10 performed better in the Outcomes category, with the most noticeable performance differences observed in the cases of Karnataka, Jharkhand and Andhra Pradesh. The other large states performed better on the Governance Processes Aiding Outcomes category, with the most noticeable performance differences observed in the cases of Odisha, Punjab and Haryana. In the Outcomes category, Karnataka led the large states, with a score of 81.9 per cent while Uttar Pradesh had the lowest score of 34.1 per cent.
In the Governance Processes Aiding Outcomes category, Kerala garnered the highest score of 79.0 per cent while Jharkhand came last with a score of 21.0 per cent.Chief Secretary Asit Kumar Tripathy and Secretary in the school and mass education department Chitra Arumugam apprised Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik of this significant achievement at the Lok Seva Bhavan on Monday.
Appreciating the efforts of the School and Mass Education department, the Chief Minister advised the department to keep up the good work and endeavour to get into the top three position. Chief advisor to Chief Minister’s Office (CMO) R Balakrishnan was also present during the presentation.