Evaluation of educational performance of Indian states using PROMETHEE-GIS approach

Purpose Quality education is a key requirement of a burgeoning country, like India as it aims to establish a sustained growth. However, the current situation of Indian education system is extremely poor. Although efforts are being made nationwide to improve the present situation, it is incontrovertible that different complications ail different Indian states. Some states suffer from a poor gross enrollment ratio, while others have an extremely high student-teacher ratio. The purpose of this paper is to compare the educational performance of 28 Indian states in order to identify those which require immediate attention. Design/methodology/approach For fulfilling this objective, a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) framework utilizing preference ranking organization method for enrichment of evaluations and geometrical analysis for interactive aid methods is adopted. Findings The results indicate that the educational performance of Goa is the best amongst all the considered alternative states, while Bihar is the laggard in this direction. Research limitations/implications From the results, the states which fare to be the worst can easily be identified along with the specific areas/criteria, where they are falling behind. Based on these findings, necessary remedial actions can be undertaken so as to improve the educational performance of the ailing states. Originality/value This paper employs a novel geographic information system (GIS) method and a hue-saturation-value color coding scheme in order to determine the influence of individual criterion on the overall state rank, thereby representing an integration of MCDM and GIS which has never been applied before for educational performance evaluation.