As has been reiterated by EducationWorld in our analyses of Union budgets of the past five years, given political will and resolution there’s considerable scope for cutting expenditure and rearranging the spending priorities of the Central government to raise substantial resources for investment in the country’s abundant but woefully neglected human resource – Dilip Thakore The much-hyped ceremony of presenting the annual Union Budget of the Central government came and went on February 1 without more than perfunctory lip service to the most important obligation of government — to make sufficient provision for developing the country’s abundant human resource. Although there is virtual unanimity within academia and the intelligentsia that post-independence India’s children and youth of school and college-going age are the country’s potentially most valuable resource, year after year, the Centre makes pathetically meagre provision for this neglected half of the country’s 1.32 billion citizens. Unsurprisingly, the Union Budget 2018-19 presented to Parliament and the nation by finance minister Arun Jaitley last month, wasn’t a departure from the norm. Out of the proposed total expenditure of Rs.24.42 lakh crore of the Central government in fiscal 2018-19, Jaitley has allocated a mere Rs.85,010 crore for primary, secondary and higher education — Rs.1,269 per capita per year for the country’s 670 million children and youth below age 24. This allocation translates into a mere 0.45 percent of the country’s projected GDP of Rs.187 lakh crore next year, and is only marginally greater than the Rs.82,771 crore budgeted (but not spent) by the BJP-led NDA government in 2015-16. Admittedly, the main burden of educating India’s children is the obligation of the country’s 29 state governments. However, it’s well-known that following the Centre’s lead, state governments don’t make adequate provision for education either. Together the Centre and states average 3.5 percent of GDP on education against the 6 percent recommended by the Kothari Commission way back in 1966, and against the 6-10 percent of GDP that the developed OECD (and ASEAN) countries spend on education of their children and youth. The quality of education, provided by English-teaching-averse state governments neck-deep in teacher recruitment and appointments and textbooks printing rackets, is the pits. Assuming that state governments’ per capita expenditure on public education is a multiple of seven of the allocation of the Centre (to aggregate 3.5 percent of GDP), the amount spent by the Central and state governments per child and youth — excluding pre-primary education which bizarrely falls under the administrative purview of the Union ministry of women and child development — averages only Rs.8,883 ($136) per year. The fallout is that the quality of public education dispensed in the country’s 1.20 million government — especially state government — schools is so poor that India’s estimated 320,000 ‘recognised’ private schools host over 40 percent of the 250 million in-school children at the start of every academic year. Even dirt-poor parents are desperate to enroll their children in the country’s 450,000 low-cost mostly ‘unrecognised’ private budget schools which have mushroomed in slums and…
