CHANDIGARH, MAY 20 — Punjab has emerged as the leading state in national school education, securing the top position across the country in the Performance Grading Index (PGI) 2.0 for States and Union Territories released by the Union Ministry of Education.
The national ranking follows a separate evaluation by NITI Aayog earlier this month, which similarly classified Punjab among the highest-performing states for educational standards.
Punjab shared the top classification, designated as the Prachesta-1 Grade for scores between 51 percent and 60 percent, exclusively with the Union Territory of Chandigarh. The state outpaced traditional educational leaders including Kerala, Delhi, Maharashtra, and Himachal Pradesh, all of which were categorized under the lower Prachesta-2 tier. The comprehensive PGI evaluation measures performance across six educational indicators, including infrastructure, equitable access, governance procedures, and teacher training methodologies.
“Topping the Learning Outcomes domain nationwide shows that our focus on conceptual understanding over rote learning is delivering real results,” Education Minister Harjot Singh Bains declared while sharing details of the report on Wednesday. He maintained that the state achieved a nationwide high score of 150.4 in classroom proficiency, which evaluates student performance in core subjects across multiple grade levels.
The central government’s district-level index further indicated that educational standards are distributed evenly across the state’s geography. Barnala district led the regional rankings with a score of 461 to achieve the Uttam-2 classification, followed closely by Sri Muktsar Sahib, SBS Nagar, Hoshiarpur, Sangrur, Tarn Taran, and Malerkotla.
The minister affirmed that the administrative turn toward modernizing schooling facilities under Chief Minister Bhagwant Singh Mann has successfully altered the regional academic baseline. He asserted that the structural shift has established local public schools as a national standard, transitioning standard academic policies into practical classroom development.
