new delhi kerala maharashtra and punjab have topped the 202021 performing grade index pgi that assesses school education at the district level with identical scores of 928 out of 1000 these states alongside new entrants gujarat rajasthan and andhra pradesh are at the lii level which also includes chandigarh no state has been able to attain the highest level of li so far the education ministry on thursday released pgi 202021 a unique index for evidencebased comprehensive analysis of the school education system in india in 201920 punjab chandigarh tamil nadu andaman and nicobar islands and kerala topped the indexamong the lii statesuts chandigarh scored 927 followed by gujarat rajasthan both 903 and andhra pradesh 902 ladakh has made significant improvement in pgi from lviii to liv in 202021 improving its score by 299 points in 202021 as compared to 201920 the highest ever improvement in a single yearthe pgi looks at the indian education system as one of the largest in the world with about 149 lakh schools 95 lakh teachers and nearly 265 crore students from varied socioeconomic backgrounds devised by the department of school education and literacy the index provides insights and datadriven mechanisms on the statewise performance of the school education system offering a comparative analysis the latest index report stated that none of the states attained the highest level l i the topmost score in 201718 was level iv which improved to level ii score range 901950 out of 1000 in 202021 implying consistent improvement across statesuts over the last four yearsno state reached the top two levels in 201718 and 201819 whereas in 202021 seven states have reached levelii similarly no state has performed below level vii in 202021 whereas in 201718 there were 12 states uts which performed below level vii showing remarkable improvement of states uts in the last 4 years it said highlighting the interstate disparity the report noted the maximum and minimum scores obtained by states in 202021 are 928 and 669 respectively the deviation between the maximum and minimum scores obtained by states is 259 or 39 arunachal pradesh is at the bottom this disparity was 51 in 201718 indicating that pgi also helped bridge the performance gap among states uts over the years the reduction in interstate differential is also due to close monitoring of schemes through evidencebased pgi which might have helped both the performing and aspiring states and uts to improve their performance