Revamping Student Database Management Information System In-sync with UDISE+ 2022-23

 Arun C Mehta
Former Professor & Head of the EMIS Department, NIEPA,  New Delhi

The Background

DISE (District Information System for Education) which later become the UDISE and is now popularly known as Unified-DISE or UDISE-plus was initiated in 1994-95 at the time of launching one of the mega programs of the Government of India toward universal primary education i.e. District Primary Education Programme (DPEP), over a period of time in a phased manner the same was extended first to the entire elementary level of education (Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan) and later to the secondary and higher secondary level of education (RMSA). The entire collection of school education data is being managed through the UDISE which has become the only source of statistics on school education in India with effect from the year 2012-13, the year in which the UDISE got the status of official statistics and all parallel collection of the information system was abandoned and UDISE remain the only source of information on school education statistics in India.

Even though widespread improvements were achieved in data collected through UDISE, but fingers have been raised on enrolment data collected through it which do not consider to be consistent which is reflected in the Table presented below:

Enrolment in Grades I to XII, 2012-13 to 2019-20

All India

Year	Enrolment
	Total, Grades I to XII	Change over Previous Year	%age Change
2012-13	25,42,75,128	-
2013-14	25,85,10,656	42,35,528	1.67
2014-15	25,94,70,306	9,59,650	0.37
2015-16	26,05,96,960	11,26,654	0.43
2016-17	25,13,36,317	-92,60,643	- 3.55
2017-18	25,09,89,193	-3,47,124	- 0.14
2018-19	24,83,38,584	-26,50,609	-1.06
2019-20	25,09,71,683	26,33,099	1.06
2020-21	25,38,04,461	28,32,778	1.13
Change over 2012-13	-	-33,03,445	- 0.19

                         Source: UDISE, different years.

SDMIS: 2016-17

Over a period of time, efforts were made to further improve the reliability and consistency of enrolment data among which the introduction of SDMIS in sync with UDISE in 2016-17 was the most prominent one which was initiated by NIEPA in consultation with the Department of School Education of the Ministry of HRD/Education. A specially designed SDMIS Data Capture Format was launched which initially had a total of 41 parameters and the idea was to generate UDISE enrolment based on the details of individual student information. Apart from the inconsistency of data, mismatching of enrolment by category, the medium of instructions, and age was another major issue because of which UDISE enrolment data was not considered reliable even though time lag in educational statistics was brought down from earlier 7 years to less than a year at the national level and only a few months at the state and district levels apart that all data gaps were bridged and the same was made available to users at all the levels, such as cluster, block, district, states and also at the national level.

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