FOR decades, India’s school education discourse has oscillated between two extremes: expanding access and lamenting quality. We built more schools, increased enrolment, improved gender parity and expanded infrastructure. Yet the deeper question persisted: were children actually learning?
NITI Aayog’s latest report, School Education System in India: Temporal Analysis and Policy Roadmap for Quality Enhancement (2026), signals an important shift in this conversation, arguing that India’s educational challenge is no longer merely about schooling, but also about meaningful learning, institutional capacity and systemic transformation. The report highlights the states that have demonstrated measurable progress. Punjab has been identified as one of the strongest performers in school education indicators, especially in governance, infrastructure and learning outcomes.
These findings merit national attention. India stands at a critical juncture where certain states are struggling with foundational gaps, and the experience of Punjab can offer important lessons for India’s next phase of educational reform.
Today, India has over 14.71 lakh schools serving over 24.69 crore students, making it one of the world’s largest school education systems. Access to schooling has expanded significantly across the country, and near-universal enrolment at the primary level has largely been achieved.
However, the Gross Enrolment Ratio at the higher secondary stage remains only 58.4 per cent, highlighting major continuity gaps in schooling across the country. The central challenge as identified by the NITI Aayog is no longer access alone, but ensuring quality learning, stronger transition rates, improved governance and institutional effectiveness.
The debate therefore can no longer remain limited to enrolment statistics. The focus must shift to learning outcomes, school leadership, teacher capacity and educational equity.
Punjab’s reforms addressed precisely this challenge. Over the past several years, Punjab has shown measurable improvements across several educational indicators. Most significantly, Punjab emerged as a leading state in the National Achievement Survey (NAS) and the Performance Grading Index (PGI), highlighting improvements in learning outcomes, governance and institutional effectiveness.
Punjab’s educational transformation becomes particularly striking when viewed through the lens of the Performance Grading Index, developed by the Ministry of Education to evaluate states across learning outcomes, governance, infrastructure and equity. In the PGI 2017 report, Punjab ranked 22nd and was among the lower performing states.
However, within a span of a few years, the state rose dramatically to emerge among the top performers nationally. The state has remained among the top performers in the PGI rankings since 2019-20 and has retained its leading ranking.
The rankings of the revamped PGI 2.0 (2025) are a testament to the sustained performance, wherein Punjab achieved the Prachesta 1 Grade, emerging as the top-performing state.
This achievement reflects that these improvements are structural, sustained and across government regimes.
Punjab invested simultaneously in school infrastructure, digital access, governance reforms, teacher accountability, community participation and student support systems. The state expanded smart schools, strengthened digital learning initiatives, introduced leadership and training programmes and attempted to improve institutional credibility within the public school system.
As identified by the NITI Aayog report, governance and school leadership are major factors affecting educational quality across states. Punjab’s experience offers important lessons here. Over the past several years, the state invested substantially in the capacity building of principals and teachers through leadership programmes, exposure visits, structured training initiatives and institutional partnerships. These efforts attempted to move school leadership beyond routine administration toward academic mentoring, innovation and institutional problem-solving.
This is critical because educational transformation is fundamentally a human systems challenge. The NITI Aayog report recommends structured leadership development, decentralised empowerment, stronger academic support systems and reforms in school governance architecture as essential components of long-term educational improvement.
Punjab’s reforms also challenge a deeply entrenched assumption in India that government schools are inherently incapable of delivering quality education.
The state’s experience demonstrates that public education systems can improve substantially when reforms are sustained politically, administratively and institutionally.
Importantly, the reforms were not limited to cosmetic interventions. Initiatives such as smart schools, digital learning platforms and the Punjab Educare App expanded access to educational resources for nearly 25 lakh students, particularly during and after the Covid pandemic.
A recurring weakness of educational reform in India has been policy discontinuity. Initiatives frequently lose momentum because priorities shift with leadership transitions or administrative reshuffles, limiting the long-term institutionalisation of reform.
As India moves towards the goal of Viksit Bharat 2047, the quality of its school education will become the defining determinant of national progress. The future will not be shaped merely by the number of schools built or enrolment percentages achieved. It will depend on whether schools can nurture capable, confident, value-driven and future-ready citizens.
The unfinished agenda remains significant. The NITI Aayog report notes continuing concerns related to foundational literacy, learning inequalities, teacher shortages, and uneven digital access across states. National surveys continue to show that many students struggle with grade-appropriate competencies in reading and numeracy despite years of schooling.
Punjab’s experience offers cautious optimism. Its progress shows that educational transformation is possible when states invest in governance, leadership, teacher motivation, institutional capacity and learning outcomes.
