Surely everybody, including the country’s purblind and inept politicians across all political parties, is aware that India’s public education system is slowly and inexorably sinking. But no one seems to be willing or able to prevent its steady descent into mediocrity and irrelevance. Myopically, the educated middle class — perhaps because it has emerged out of the country’s small (200,000 schools) private education system which despite its modest proportion (15 percent) of the overall number of primary-secondary schools countrywide, hosts over half of in-school children — isn’t interested in upgradation of the public/government system which it’s funding through taxes.
This is narrow-minded and self-destructive thinking of the worst sort. The plain truth is that India’s rock-bottom productivity in agriculture, manufacturing and services — including government services — won’t improve until and unless teaching standards and learning outcomes in the country’s 1.10 million government schools are raised sharply and quickly. Given this irrefutable reality, it’s shocking that in the Union Budget 2015-16, for the first time in the history of independent India, the Central government’s outlay for education (Rs.69,075 crore) is lower than even the revised (reduced) expenditure (Rs.70,705 crore) of the previous fiscal year.
The rationale advanced by finance minister Arun Jaitley for this unprecedented cut in the Centre’s education budget is that with the Union government having accepted the recommendation of the 14th Finance Commission to disburse 42 percent of the Centre’s tax revenue proceeds to the states, as against 32 percent hitherto, state governments will increase their education budgets and outlays.
This is wishful thinking because the record of state governments in promoting education (a concurrent subject under the Constitution) is pathetic.
Over the past six decades, state governments dominated by quasi-literate rustic politicians neck-deep in textbook printing and teacher appointment and transfer rackets, have run Indian education into the ground. For further and better particulars, read our special report feature which analyses — and laments — Union Budget 2015-16 from the education perspective.
However, despite the lamentations in our special report about the raw deal meted out to the nation’s children by the country’s short-sighted elected leaders, all is not lost. In several rural and urban habitats within our vast subcontinent, a rising number of enlightened and innovative educationists are engaged in repairing broken education systems and improving learning outcomes. In our first cover story of the new fiscal year, Summiya Yasmeen with the assistance of our national network of correspondents, presents profiles of 22 unsung extraordinary education innovators who offer hope that Indian education can still be rescued and rehabilitated. A plea to the country’s indifferent intelligentsia and middle class: Please aid and enable them. In your own and the national interest.