The Union Education Minister has released the Report on United Information System for Education Plus (UDISE+) 2019-20 for School Education in India.

What is UDISE+?

• UDISE+ is one of the largest Management Information Systems on school education.
• It covers more than 1.5 million schools, 8.5 million teachers and 250 million children.
• Launched in 2018-2019, UDISE+ was introduced to speed up data entry, reduce errors, improve data quality and ease its verification.
• It is an updated and improved version of UDISE, which was initiated in 2012-13 by the Ministry of Education under the UPA govt by integrating DISE for elementary education and SEMIS for secondary education.

Why is it important?

• As per the UDISE+ website, “Timely and accurate data is the basis of sound and effective planning and decision-making.
• Towards this end, the establishment of a well-functioning and Sustainable Educational Management Information System is of utmost importance today.”
• In short, the UDISE+ helps measure the education parameters from classes 1 to 12 in government and private schools across India.

What does the 2019-20 report say?

• The total enrolment in 2019-20 from primary to higher secondary levels of school education was a little over 25.09 crore.
• Enrolment for boys was 13.01 crore and that of the girls was 12.08 crore.
• This was an increase by more than 26 lakh over the previous year 2018-19.

(1) Pupil-teacher ratio improves

• The Pupil-Teacher Ratio — the average number of pupils (at a specific level of education) per teacher (teaching at that level of education) in a given school year — showed an improvement all levels of school education in 2019-2020 over 2012-2013.

(2) GER improves

• The gross enrolment ratio (GER), which compares the enrolment in a specific level of education to the population of the age group which is age-appropriate for that level of education has improved at all levels in 2019-2020 compared to 2018-2019.
• The GER increased to 89.7 percent (from 87.7 percent) at Upper Primary level, 97.8 percent (from 96.1 percent) at Elementary Level, 77.9 percent (from 76.9 percent) at Secondary Level and 51.4 percent (from 50.1 percent) at Higher Secondary Level in 2019-20 compared to 2018-19.
• GER for girls at secondary level has gone up by 9.6 percent to reach 77.8 percent in 2019-20 compared to 68.2 percent in 2012-13.

(3) Phyical infrastructure improves, but computers and internet access remain lacking

• The report stated that just 38.5 percent of schools across the country had computers, while only 22.3 percent had an internet connection in 2019-20.
• This is an improvement over 2018-2019 when 34.5 percent of schools had computers and a mere 18.7 percent of schools had internet access.

Key takeaways

• While physical infrastructure is steadily improving, the digital infrastructure for schools has a long way to go.
• With the overwhelming majority of schools have neither computers (61 percent) nor internet access (78 percent), achieving the Centre’s ‘Digital India’ vision when it comes to online education is still some ways off.
• The vast increase in hand wash facilities is a big step towards the fulfilment of the Modi government’s ‘Swachh Bharat’ push.
• The Gross Enrolment Ratio improving at all levels of school education in 2019-20 compared to 2018-19 is a plus.
• While 93 lakh more boys enrolled in education than girls, when it comes to GER, the girls pulled ahead.

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