Data That Improves Schools Versus Data That Buries Them: Making Sense of the Information Flood

Data That Improves Schools vs. Data That Buries Them: Fixing How India’s Headmasters Report Upward

A contributing voice from policy analysis | Specialist in curriculum, pedagogy, and school leadership

Indian headmasters spend growing hours entering data into government portals — and very little of it comes back down in a form that helps the school improve. The system pulls information up through UDISE+, attendance apps, and mid-day meal trackers, verifies it at cluster, district, and state level, and largely stops there. The fix does not require new data. It requires the same data to travel back down to the person who collected it, in a form they can act on.

Key facts

• UDISE+ collects data from roughly 1.47 million schools, 9.8 million teachers, and over 200 million students every year — one of the largest education datasets in the world, managed by the Ministry of Education’s Department of School Education and Literacy.
• A December 2025 Careers360 report on teacher data-entry burden found government-school teachers routinely toggle between five or more separate portals — UDISE+, attendance-tracking systems, mid-day meal apps, and training platforms — often finishing entries after the school day ends.
• UDISE+ data goes through a three-stage verification process — cluster level, district level, and state level — before certification, according to the Ministry’s own clarification to the Press Information Bureau.
• The Performance Grading Index (PGI) 2.0 scores states and districts on 73 indicators, but reports results at state and district level only — individual schools do not receive an indicator-level report back.
• In 2023, the Ministry of Education had to publicly defend UDISE+ dropout figures after a state minister disputed them — an example of the same dataset being used to argue about schools rather than to help any one of them.

The data flows up. The insight rarely flows back down

A headmaster who spends an hour after the bell entering attendance, facility, and teacher data into five different portals should, at minimum, get something back from at least one of them.

The Careers360 reporting captures the mechanism directly: a teacher in Anantapur, Andhra Pradesh, described staying back after the 4 pm bell most days, switching between UDISE+, the state attendance system, and mid-day meal portals, because entries are due the same day and missed fields trigger follow-up messages from the department. That is real time, taken from lesson planning, spent producing a dataset the teacher who produced it will likely never see analysed.

The Performance Grading Index illustrates the same gap at a system level. PGI 2.0 turns UDISE+ and other inputs into 73 indicators across learning outcomes, access, infrastructure, and governance — genuinely useful analysis — but it grades states and districts, not individual schools. A headmaster whose data feeds directly into that index has no equivalent report telling them where their own school sits against the same indicators.

Five principles for making the data loop close

1. Diagnose which data would actually help, not which data is easiest to request. A headmaster does not need a state-level PGI score; they need their own school’s attendance pattern, grade-wise learning levels, and facility gaps in one place. Ask cluster and block resource coordinators directly which of the reports they already generate could simply be shared back with the school that supplied the underlying numbers.
2. Build the relationship with whoever holds the data, not just the portal. Cluster Resource Coordinators (CRCs) and Block Resource Coordinators (BRCs) sit between the school and the state system and often have access to comparative data a headmaster cannot see directly. A headmaster who has a working relationship with that person is more likely to get an informal data-back arrangement than one relying on the portal alone.
3. Push for consistency in what gets reported back, not just what gets collected. A one-time data request yields a one-time answer. A standing ask — the same attendance and learning-level summary, requested on the same schedule every term — is far more likely to become a habit the system maintains.
4. Use community and NGO partners as a parallel data source. Where government feedback loops are slow, organisations such as Pratham (through ASER-style tools) and Azim Premji Foundation publish methods schools can use to generate their own learning-level snapshot without waiting for a portal to report back.
5. Start with the data you can already see. A headmaster does not need a systemic fix to begin: the school’s own UDISE+ submission from the prior year, if requested through the CRC/BRC, is already a usable diagnostic — most schools have simply never asked to see the number they themselves entered.

Frequently asked questions

How many separate portals does a typical government-school teacher update? Reporting from Careers360 describes teachers juggling at least five — UDISE+, state attendance-tracking systems (such as SATS in Karnataka), DIKSHA, mid-day meal portals, and training-attendance apps — often without a single unified login.

Does UDISE+ data actually affect a specific school’s funding or staffing? Yes. Accurate facility and teacher-module entries feed directly into funding allocation under Samagra Shiksha and into pupil-teacher-ratio-based staffing decisions, which is exactly why incomplete or erroneous entries at the school level carry real consequences.

Is there any level at which a school can see its own performance data, not just the state’s? Not by default under PGI, which reports at state and district level. Some states run additional school-level dashboards; a headmaster’s most reliable route to their own school’s data is usually a direct, standing request through the CRC or BRC rather than the public PGI reports.

Is the push toward AI-based data verification going to reduce this burden? Ministry-linked reporting on AI/ML approaches to UDISE+ data quality focuses on flagging inconsistencies — such as a teacher’s salary and UDISE+ listing pointing to different schools — for state-level review. That improves data accuracy; it does not, on its own, change whether a school ever sees its own numbers again.

What to do:

1. Identify which one of the five-plus portals your school reports into actually generates a comparative or trend report, and ask your CRC or BRC directly whether that report can be shared back with your school each term.
2. Speak with one headmaster or CRC who has successfully obtained school-level feedback from the system, and ask specifically how they requested it and how often it arrives.
3. Pull your school’s own most recent UDISE+ submission and compare it, line by line, against what you believe to be true about your enrolment, facilities, and staffing — errors here directly affect funding and staffing decisions.
4. Propose one standing request — a termly attendance and learning-level summary, for example — to your BRC, framed as a repeatable arrangement rather than a one-off favour.
5. Set a review date four weeks out to check whether that request produced anything, and note it in writing so the ask does not quietly lapse.

Sources: UDISE+ 2025-26 data-entry guidance, Education For All in India; “Teaching through logins,” Careers360, December 2025; Ministry of Education/PIB statement on UDISE+ reliability, 2023; Performance Grading Index (PGI) 2.0 reports, Ministry of Education, Department of School Education and Literacy; Education For All in India, “AI and UDISE+.”