Unified District Information on School Education (UDISE)

Source: Yojana Magazine

Timely and accurate data is the basis of sound and effective planning and decision-making. Towards this end, the establishment of a well-functioning and sustainable Educational Management Information System(EMIS) is of utmost importance today.

UDISE

Unified District Information on School Education (UDISE) initiated in 2012-13 integrating DISE for elementary education and SEMIS for secondary education is one of the largest Management Information Systems on School Education covering more than 1.5 million schools, 8.5 million teachers and 250 million children.

Timeline of UDISE and data collection

In the early 1990’s, as part of the District Primary Education Programme(DPEP) national endeavour, a school-based comp[uterised information system was designed and developed
An Education Management Information System(EMIS), called the District Information for Education(DISE) was created for Classes I to V for planning and monitoring the implementation of DPEP in 42 districts of 7 selected states.
Over the years this was extended to cover the entire elementary level of education till class VIII.
In 2008-09, with the introduction of the Rashtriya Madhyamik Siksha Abhiyan(RMSA), a separate and dedicated Secondary Education Management Information System(SEMIS) was started for class IX to XII.
Subsequently, in 2012-13, the Unified District Information system for Education(UDISE) was launched by integrating the DISE for elementary education and SEMIS for secondary education.
Since then, UDISE has acquired the status of Official Statistics of the Ministry of Human Resources Development (MHRD) and is now operational in all the districts of the country.
All the parallel systems of data collection, including annual data collection by the Department of School Education & Literacy, MHRD, have discontinued and UDISE is the only source of information for the school education system.
All MHRD publications with regard to school education statistics are now exclusively based on UDISE data

Limitations of UDISE

The offline data collection system
Lack of accountability due to the absence of audit trail
Single DISe Data Capture Format(DCF) for all categories of schools
Lack of verification and analysis of Data
Lack of coordination and supervision
Multiple versions of data collection software

UDISE+

UDISE+ (UDISE plus) is an updated and improved version of UDISE. Under this entire system will be online and will gradually move towards collecting data in real-time. Data from 2018-19 will be collected through this software.

Features of UDISE+

The salient features of UDISE+ can be categorized under the following heads:

Data capture

- Online uploading of data: to enable real-time exchange of information, online uploading of UDISE+ data has been made mandatory from 2018-19.
- Traceability and audit trail of officials uploading the data
- Separate DCFs for each category of schools
- Rationalization of DCF
- Real-time collection of data
- Control and Supervision: UDISE+ is now hosted on the server of the National Informatics Centre