Letter from the Editor
Since I was editor of Business India and Businessworld almost two decades ago, I have been complaining about the format of the Union budget and the manner in which it is presented. For one, the budget is essentially a monetised statement of accounts, i.e it rarely reports the physical outcomes of money spent by government. I believe my constant complaining in print was a causative factor which prompted the finance minister to frame and publish an outcomes budget last year. But the budget outcomes report is harder to find than water in a desert, and the public is still in the dark about the additional number of national assets created after the huge amount of Rs. 543,000 crore was spent by the Central government in fiscal 2005-06. How many additional kilometres of road were built? How many new canals were added to the irrigation network? How many new hospitals and primary health centres constructed? The budget doesn’t say. When the chairman of a company presents his annual report to shareholders he is obliged by law to provide details, not only of income and expenditure, but also of physical output. Thus the chairman of an automobile company has to provide details relating to the number of automobiles and auto components produced in the year past, and proposed to be manufactured next year. I have never been able to understand why the Union finance minister doesn’t likewise include output and performance data in his budget speech. I suspect this is because the Union budget format is designed to conceal more than it reveals.
This is particularly true of the provision made for education in Budget 2006-07. In his budget speech, the finance minister claims he has given "primacy" to public education for which he has made a 31.5 percent higher provision in 2006-07. But while this is welcome, this provision has little correlation with the needs of India’s massive population of 415 million children. Surely the finance minister is aware that way back in the 1960s the Kothari Committee — and several other expert committees since — had recommended that the national annual outlay for education should be raised to 6 percent of GDP. Not only has this recommendation been consistently ignored, Budget 2006-07 completely glosses over the issue of adequacy of provision.
There’s a blind spot within government and the establishment of the urgent need to develop the nation’s high potential human capital. An analysis of the widely acclaimed Union budget 2006-07 from the perspective of the needs of the education sector, is the subject matter of our cover story this month.
And in our equally important special report feature, Lucknow correspondent Vidya Pandit investigates the nation’s anarchic pre-school education system. Pre-schools, which should gently and joyfully induct tiny tots in the age group 3-5 into socialisation and group activity in preparation for the formal school system, are gradually morphing into stressful tuition centres. She perceptively attributes this regressive development to incremental parental anxiety about downstream admission into quality (i.e privately promoted) primary-cum-secondary schools, where capacity creation is choked by persistent licence-permit-quota raj.
Dilip Thakore