No school attains top ‘Utkarsh’ grade; state posts best-ever national PGI score despite stark findings

Shillong, July 24: Meghalaya on Friday unveiled its first-ever Meghalaya School Performance Grading Index (MSPGI), a statewide report card that has laid bare the challenges confronting school education, with 90% of the state’s 11,443 schools placed in the lower performance bands and none achieving the highest ‘Utkarsh’ grade.

Released by Education Minister Lahkmen Rymbui, the MSPGI is the first school-level assessment framework of its kind in the state. It evaluates every recognised school across 43 indicators spanning accessibility, digital education, infrastructure, implementation of the National Education Policy (NEP), and quality parameters, assigning each institution a score, grade and state ranking.

The findings reveal a system where excellence remains elusive. Not a single school secured the top Utkarsh (Outstanding) grade, while only 113 schools (1%) made it to the Uttam category. Another 1,027 schools (9%) were placed in the Prachesta band, leaving 10,303 schools—or nine out of every 10—in the Akanshi category, which represents schools requiring varying degrees of improvement.

Jyoti Sroat Higher Secondary School in East Khasi Hills emerged as the state’s best-performing institution with a score of 930 out of 1,000, narrowly missing the top grade, while Step by Step Lawwahskei L.P. School in West Khasi Hills ranked last with a score of 26.

The report also highlights where the state’s education system is concentrated. Nearly 37.4% of all schools fall within the Akanshi-3 and Akanshi-4 grades, indicating that although many institutions have achieved basic levels of access and infrastructure, they continue to lag in digital education, NEP implementation and other quality benchmarks needed to move into higher-performing categories.

Speaking at the launch, Rymbui said the MSPGI should not be viewed as a league table but as a tool to help schools identify gaps and plan improvements. The Education Department said the report cards will be used by schools, School Management Committees and district authorities to prioritise interventions and monitor progress over time.

The school-level assessment comes even as Meghalaya has recorded its highest-ever score in the Union government’s Performance Grading Index (PGI). The state scored 525.71 points in 2025-26, improving by two grades from Akanshi-3 to Akanshi-1—its best performance since the national index was introduced. The report attributes the improvement to reforms such as school rationalisation, infrastructure upgrades, better data management, teacher capacity building and technology-enabled governance.

Officials said the MSPGI complements the national PGI by shifting the focus from state-level performance to individual schools, allowing policymakers to identify institution-specific gaps instead of relying solely on statewide averages. The framework is based on authenticated UDISE+ data and assesses schools across five domains through a weighted scoring system.

While the report stops short of measuring students’ learning outcomes, it offers the state’s most detailed picture yet of the institutional strengths and weaknesses of every recognised school. For the government, the challenge now is to translate the findings into improvements on the ground and move thousands of schools out of the Akanshi band in the years ahead.

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