SHILLONG: Chief Minister Conrad K. Sangma has expressed strong optimism that Meghalaya will secure a significantly higher rank in the upcoming Performance Grading Index (PGI) assessments.
This statement follows consecutive years where the state found itself at the bottom of the national grading, prompting the state government to implement a series of comprehensive corrective measures aimed at transforming and uplifting the local education sector.
Speaking to media persons, the Chief Minister acknowledged that Meghalaya’s education department has faced deep-rooted challenges for years.
He explained that several legacy operational factors had severely impacted the state’s overall PGI score and evaluation criteria.
Among the primary structural hurdles, Sangma pointed out a bizarre institutional setup where up to four separate schools were found operating independently within the exact same building. In reality, these institutions should have functioned as a single, unified school.
Because each of these split entities holds its own distinct UDISE number and is registered independently with the Government of India, the central assessment treats every unit as an isolated institution.
This fragmented approach drags down the data collection process to a state-wide average, which ultimately serves as the main catalyst for driving down Meghalaya’s performance ranking across multiple assessment parameters.
To rectify these deep-seated issues and boost the state’s PGI standing, the Chief Minister shared that the government has made several major policy decisions. These include structuring a definitive and formalized new pay scale for Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) teachers as well as other categories of school educators managing these institutions.
Furthermore, the government has focused its efforts on improving student pass percentages and aggressively bringing down the school dropout rate. These interventions have already started yielding positive results, with Meghalaya’s dropout rate now falling successfully below the national average.
Elaborating on the historical high dropout rates, Sangma clarified that the crisis was previously triggered by the fact that nearly 50 percent of students routinely failed the Secondary School Leaving Certificate (SSLC) examinations.
This high failure rate effectively blocked half of the student population from progressing to Class XII. This bottleneck severely penalized the state’s PGI ranking, which allocates heavy weightage and specific points to student transition and retention rates across all educational levels.
In light of these structural overhauls, the Chief Minister urged everyone to wait for the upcoming 2025–2026 PGI assessment report, which is scheduled to be released around June or July. He maintains high expectations that Meghalaya’s scores will see a substantial upward jump.
Sangma concluded by emphasizing that visible turnarounds in the education sector naturally take time to reflect in official reports.
He asserted that the strategic decisions and systematic reforms executed by his government over the last three to four years are finally poised to manifest as tangible results and positive changes in the 2025–2026 PGI rankings and in the years beyond.
