suspect that for the overwhelming majority of the population  and particularly for right-thinking members of society  the annual Union budget presentation exercise projected as an event of momentous significance by the media, is an occasion of frustration and disappointment. Quite obviously the primary purpose of this annual tax-and-spend ritual is for the Union government to extract taxes from the citizenry to pay its own maintenance and establishment expenses. All those foreign junkets of ministers and secretaries of government, their sprawling bungalows in imperial Delhi, private jets, impressive motorcades, free rail travel etc, have to be paid for by the public. The common practice of finance ministers is to subsume the high cost of government into the Union government’s revenue expenditure  explained by Dr. Narendra Pani of the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore  as the sum government proposes to spend within the current fiscal year, i.e excluding long-term investment. This sum budgeted at Rs.658,119 crore in 2008-09 far exceeds the Union government’s budgeted tax and other revenue receipts of Rs.602,935 crore. My interpretation of this huge revenue deficit is that the Central government spends too much on establishment and non-development items such as defence, middle class and public sector subsidies, interest payouts etc with the result there’s little left for development spending. Commonsense dictates that like most prudent households, the Union government should cut revenue expenditure to save 15-20 percent of annual income for contingencies.
In the circumstances, it’s hardly surprising that the best Budget 2008-09 could provide for the education of India’s 450 million children was Rs.34,400 crore which translates into an unimpressive Rs.764 per capita per year. Admittedly this provision is constitutionally required to be augmented by the country’s 29 state governments. But historically the state governments suffering similar fiscal constraints as the Centre, are laggards in education provision. However what Indian education needs most is a massive dose of infrastructure and capacity expansion, i.e capital investment, for which the cupboard is bare. Therefore I believe that for education and health, upon which the country’s future depends, government should switch to needs-based budgeting, i.e ascertain demand, and devise ways and means to fulfil it.
To this end, we press-ganged Prof. A.S. Seetharamu, a proponent of needs-based budgeting for education, to formulate a blueprint for equipping all government primary and upper primary schools  notorious for their infrastructure failures and deficiencies  with modest laboratory, library and lavatory (lab-lib-lav) facilities. According to Dr. Seetharamu’s calculus featured in this issue, this requires a one-time capital expenditure of Rs.47,725 crore  equivalent to a mere 1.06 percent of GDP.
As detailed in our cover story, there’s more than enough hidden wealth within the Indian economy to finance this one-time expenditure through a supplementary budget presented before the start of the new academic year in June. If the UPA government acts on this suggestion, it will surely sweep the next general election.
And in our special report feature written on the cusp of school summer vacations, assistant editor Summiya Yasmeen solicited reading lists from an eclectic mix of educationists, principals and counsellors.
Dilip Thakore