New Delhi: Centre's Niti Aayog has released the 'School Education Quality Index' (SEQI) report. The report revealed that among 20 large states, Kerala is rated the best performer with a score of 76.6% in school education. Meanwhile, Uttar Pradesh has been marked as the worst with 36.4% as rated by the assessment titles, School Education Quality Index. 

At the same time, Haryana, Assam and Uttar Pradesh showed improvement in their performance in 2016-17 in comparison to the base year of 2015-16. West Bengal could not be rated as it did not have the required data. 

The names of 20 states with rankings:

Kerala (1), Rajasthan (2), Karnataka(3), Andhra Pradesh (4), Gujarat (5), Assam (6), Maharashtra (7), Tamil Nadu (8), Himachal Pradesh (9), Uttarakhand (10), Haryana (11), Orissa (12), Chhattisgarh (13), Telangana (14), Madhya Pradesh (15), Jharkhand (16), Bihar (17), Punjab (18), Jammu Kashmir (19) and Uttar Pradesh (20).

Among the eight states that fall in the small states category, the rankings reveal that five have shown an improvement of which three, Meghalaya, Nagaland and Goa stood out with gains of 14.1, 13.5 and 8.2 percentage points while Arunachal Pradesh and Mizoram have shown a drop.
 
NITI Aayog vice-chairman Rajiv Kumar said time has now come to not only focus on access to education but on quality when it comes to the country's school education system.