NEW DELHI: After ranking states on ease of doing business and agriculture reforms, the Narendra Modi government is set to rank states on education outcomes in a move aimed at encouraging states to improve outcomes in cost-effective ways, boost innovation and share best practices. The first such ranking is expected to be out in June next year.The government's think tank NITI Aayog along with the ministry of human resource development has developed a School Education Quality Index (SEQI) that will assess and rank states based on 34 indicators across five domains including learning outcomes, access outcomes, equity outcomes, governance process and structural reforms undertaken by states."SEQI will calculate annual statelevel scores on a composite index and report annual improvement of states along key domains of education quality," NITI Aayog wrote in a letter to health ministry.While the SEQI will be measured in "levels", the goal is not so much to compare the levels of this index across states as to compare the improvements that states make on this index each year, the letter said. That is because levels reflect cumulative factors over several decades."This will enable states that are effective in improving key outcomes to be recognised and for their successful policies to be shared and adopted across other states," the letter said.The index will be calculated annually in each of the five domains on a total of 1,000 with learning outcome domain having the highest score of 600 whereas all other domains have a score of 100 each.NITI Aayog will hold the first round of consultation with states on Tuesday to sensitise northern states and union territories to the index and support them in this regard.A senior government official said that the first version of SEQI to be out in 2017 will use district information system of education (DISE) 2014-15 as the base year for all indicators based on DISE and DISE 2015-16 as the current year.To verify the outcome data quality, the National Council of Educational Research and Training will conduct a high-quality sample-based survey annually to enable annual calculation of improvements in learning outcomes."If adequate data is not available, high quality external third-party assessments of learning may be used," said the official, who did not wish to be identified.