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Chetan Setia’s Punjab ‘No. 1’ education reel mixes a real 2024-25 lead with a false 2020 baseline
Chetan Setia’s reel says Punjab jumped from 27th in 2020 to No. 1 in school education. The latest PGI does make Punjab the highest-scoring state and the national leader in its learning-outcomes domain, but official records show Punjab was already top by overall PGI score in 2019-20 and 9th among large states in NITI Aayog’s earlier SEQI; the 2026 NITI report is not a new overall ranking.
A June 2026 Instagram reel by creator Chetan Setia says Punjab moved from 27th place in school education in 2020 to No. 1 in India, describes the result as an official Government of India ranking based on roughly 70 factors, and says Punjab’s strongest area is learning outcomes. The reel captures an important current result, but it combines different education assessments and an unsupported baseline in a way that overstates a single turnaround story.
What the latest official PGI shows
The Union Ministry of Education’s Performance Grading Index (PGI) 2.0 for 2024-25 gives Punjab an overall score of 709.1/1,000. Punjab and Chandigarh are the only jurisdictions in the highest grade attained that year, Prachesta-1; no state or Union Territory reached the four grades above it. Chandigarh’s overall score, 739.1, is higher than Punjab’s, so “No. 1 in India” needs qualification: Punjab is the highest-scoring state, not the highest-scoring state-or-UT jurisdiction.
The reel is on firmer ground about learning outcomes. In the 2024-25 PGI, Punjab scores 150.4/240 in the Learning Outcomes domain, the highest score among states and UTs and the only one in the Uttam-3 grade for that domain. But the PGI does not measure only learning. Its current methodology uses 73 indicators across learning outcomes, access, infrastructure and facilities, equity, governance processes, and teacher education and training.
The “27th in 2020” claim does not match the cited national indices
The reel’s baseline is the central problem. In the Ministry of Education’s PGI 2019-20, Punjab scored 929/1,000 and occupied the highest grade alongside Chandigarh, Tamil Nadu, Andaman & Nicobar Islands and Kerala. Contemporary reporting based on the official release placed Punjab at the top by overall score. Punjab therefore was not 27th in that 2019-20 PGI.
Nor does the earlier NITI Aayog School Education Quality Index (SEQI) supply a 27th-place 2020 baseline. The first SEQI, released in 2019 using 2016-17 as its reference year, ranked Punjab 9th among 20 large states. The categories in that index were not a single all-India league table of every state and Union Territory.
NITI Aayog’s 2026 report is not a new SEQI league table
NITI Aayog did publish a major education report in May 2026, School Education System in India: Temporal Analysis and Policy Roadmap for Quality Enhancement. It is a decade-long policy analysis drawing on UDISE+, PARAKH, NAS and ASER data; it is not presented by NITI Aayog as a new edition of SEQI with one overall state ranking.
That report nevertheless documents strong Punjab outcomes. In PARAKH 2024 results cited by NITI Aayog, Punjab records 74% in language, 62% in mathematics and 64% in “The World Around Us” at the preparatory stage; at the middle stage it records 69% in language, 52% in mathematics, 54% in science and 52% in social science. The same report records 99% computer availability and 88.9% internet availability in Punjab schools, and places Punjab among the states performing strongly across learning stages. These are substantive indicators of strength, but they are not evidence of a NITI-issued “No. 1 overall” SEQI ranking in 2026.
What the evidence means
Punjab’s current school-education performance is significant: the latest PGI shows a large rise from 631.2 in 2023-24 to 709.1 in 2024-25, making it the highest-scoring state, while its learning-outcomes domain leads all states and UTs. That improvement deserves attention independently of political messaging.
But the “27th to 1st” narrative compresses unlike datasets and time periods. Punjab had already reached the top overall PGI score for 2019-20, before the present Aam Aadmi Party government took office in 2022. The latest improvement under the current government is real, but these rankings alone cannot establish that one administration caused the entire claimed rise. Comparing the same index across consistent years is necessary before attributing a turnaround to a particular government.
Conclusion: the reel is misleading in its timeline and framing. Punjab is currently the top-scoring state in PGI 2.0 for 2024-25 and leads the PGI learning-outcomes domain across states and UTs. However, it was not 27th in the 2019-20 PGI or the NITI Aayog SEQI reference ranking, Chandigarh has a higher 2024-25 overall PGI score, and NITI Aayog’s May 2026 policy report is not a new single-rank SEQI league table.
