Abstract

Education especially school education is one of the very important components of social development. Since independence, education has been visualized in government policies as a precursor to national development as well as to better quality of life. Due to the initiative taken by the states and centre, education system in India has expanded exponentially over the past years, but its current achievement is grossly inadequate in realizing its potential greatness. Social development is not pre-determined but is a continuous process of improvement of level of living. The level of development cannot be fully estimated by a single indicator. Moreover, a number of indicators when analyzed individually do not provide an integrated and easily comprehensible picture of reality and thus need to be analyzed together. Therefore, the study has worked out the status of development in school education on the basis of a number of their developmental indicators. Narain et al. (1991) estimated the level of socio-economic development for different states for the year 1971 - 1972 and 1981 - 1982. The study revealed that there were wide disparities in the level of development among different states. Narain et al. (2007) evaluated the composite indices of development in respect of agricultural, infrastructural and socio-economic sectors for 282 districts. The present study has designed ‘weighted composite index’. The level of development has been estimated with the help of weighted composite index based on optimum combination of all the developmental indicators.

Key words: Composite index, weighted composite index, development indicators