Middle class India’s public education blindspot

In gab fests on television and deluge of analyses in the print media following presentation of the Union Budget 2012-13 on March 16, education —  particularly the pathetically inadequate provision for schooling the world’s largest child and youth population — was rarely discussed. Summiya Yasmeen investigates

Despite not a single memorable invention or process contributing to improvement of the human condition in India or abroad having emerged from the ramshackle super-structure of post-independence India’s education system comprising 1.26 million primary-secondary schools, 611 universities and 31,000 colleges in the past 65 years, education is still the blindspot of the Indian establishment and society.

In gab fests on television and deluge of analyses in the print media which followed the presentation of Union Budget 2012-13 by finance minister Pranab Mukherjee on March 16, the subject — particularly the pathetically inadequate provision for schooling and educating the world’s largest child and youth population — was rarely discussed. Industry and finance experts, economists and politicians who waxed eloquent on Budget 2012-13 over several man days, had precious little to say about the grudging budgetary provi-sion made for the creation of additional capacity or improving the rock-bottom quality of education in the country’s 1.25 million government schools characterised by crumbling infra-structure, unchecked teacher truancy, and abysmal learning outcomes. Most post-budget analyses focused on the rising fiscal deficit (5.9 percent of GDP), widening ambit of service tax, the 2 percent increase in excise and customs duties, cutting of fuel and fertiliser subsidies, and the additional inflationary impact of Budget 2012-13 on the Indian economy.

Likewise, in his 90-minute budget speech delivered against the backdrop of humiliating electoral defeat of the Congress party in the recently concl-uded state assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh and Punjab, intensifying friction within the ten-party coalition UPA II government and talk of a mid-term general election, presenting his seventh Union budget, Congress veteran Mukherjee opted for business as usual. Unmindful of the demographic profile of the country — 480 million citizens of India are below 18 years of age — he dismissed education in four short paragraphs, budgeting a token 18 percent (unadjusted for inflation) increase in the education (primary, secondary and tertiary) outlay from Rs.52,000 crore in 2011-12 to Rs.61,472 crore in 2012-13.

“The Right to Education (RTE) Act is being implemented with effect from April 1, 2010 through the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA). For 2012-13 I have provided Rs.25,555 crore for RTE-SSA. This is an increase of 21.7 percent over 2011-12… The Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyan (RMSA) was launched in March 2009 to enhance access to quality secondary education. In 2012-13 I have allocated Rs.3,124 crore for RMSA which is nearly 29 percent higher than the allocation in 2011-12,” said Mukherjee blandly reciting these inadequate allocations, without even paying lip service to the vital importance of education and human resource development for the growth of the economy.

Mukherjee also announced that “in the Twelfth Plan, 6,000 schools have been proposed to be set up at block level as model schools to benchmark excellence. Of these, 2,500 will be set up under public-private partnership”. However no provision was made yet again for promotion of these model schools which were promised way back in 2007 by prime minister Manmohan Singh in his Independence Day speech.

Not that there was no good news for select education institutions in Budget 2012-13. In last year’s budget, a few premier IITs and IIMs were conferred one-time grants of Rs.20-100 crore. This time the focus was on agriculture and rural higher education institutions. Acknowledging that “the driving force of a modern nation is research and the creation of new knowledge”, the finance minister allocated one-time grants to nine agriculture universities and rural development schools including Kerala Agriculture University (Rs.100 crore), Institute of Rural Management, Anand (Rs.25 crore), University of Agricultural Sciences, Dharwad (Rs.50 crore), Orissa University of Agriculture & Technology (Rs.50 crore), among others (see box below).

Not a few economic pundits and talking heads on television have been impressed by the 21.7 percent increase in the Centre’s allocation for primary education (RTE-SSA) to Rs.25,555 crore. Yet they tend to gloss over the fact that the estimated number of children which fall under the ambit of RTE is 190 million countrywide, resulting in a per child provision of Rs.1,345 or Rs.112 per month, which falls pathetically short for delivering minimal quality primary/elementary education.

Moreover it’s pertinent to note the Central gov-ernment’s total outlay for education in 2012-13 (Rs.61,472 crore) aggre-gates a mere 0.64 percent of GDP, estimated at Rs.9589,503 crore this year. Assuming that India’s 28 state govern-ments and seven Union territories will together expend Rs.270,000 crore on education, together the national outlay (Centre plus states) on education aggregates Rs.331,472 crore — less than 4 percent of GDP, and way short of the 6 percent recommended by the high-powered Kothari Commission in 1966. In contrast, most developed industrial nations average annual expenditures of 5-6 percent of their substantially larger GDPs for education. The US for instance spends 5.7 percent of its $15.2 trillion (Rs.77520,000 crore) GDP on education and UK 5.3 percent (£90.6 billion or Rs.742,920 crore).

Some economists and pundits — particularly Swaminathan Aiyar, consulting editor of the Economic Times — believe that the 3.2-3.5 percent of GDP expended annually by government (Centre plus states) is adequate, stressing that the neighbouring People’s Republic of China (PRC) spends a mere 2.5 percent of GDP on education annually. But this argument for expenditure efficiency rather than greater budgetary provision for education ignores the reality that the PRC’s GDP is five times that of India, and the fact that 90 percent of the allocations made for education by Beijing and the provincial governments, flows into primary-secondary education (cf. India’s 60 percent). Higher education in China is expensive, unlike India, where it is heavily subsidised with tuition fees in most government-funded universities and colleges frozen at 1950 levels.

Union human resource development minister Kapil Sibal, who is also in charge of the telecom ministry with which he has been preoccupied of late and whose star has dimmed following some injudicious comments he made about anti-corruption crusader Anna Hazare and the comptroller and auditor general, reacted to Mukherjee’s miserly allocation for education with careful political correctness. “It is commendable that the finance minister has continued to invest in education in a difficult year like this. This is the surest road to empowerment,” Sibal told Hindustan Times (March 16), while studiously refraining from commenting on the adequacy of the allocation made for education in the budget and particularly his pet legislation — the historic Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act (RTE), 2009, which is a non-starter.

Quite clearly the finance minister’s allocation of Rs.25,555 crore for attaining the objectives of the RTE Act, which makes it compulsory for the State (Central, state and local governments) to provide free and compulsory education to all children between ages six-14, and has been clubbed with the SSA (primary education for all) programme — although 21.7 percent higher than the SSA outlay last year — is still grossly inadequate. According to conservative estimates, to implement infrastructure upgradation and the teacher-pupil norm of 1:30 stipulated by the RTE Act, an annual provision of Rs.48,169 crore is needed with Rs.27,169 crore required to be mobilised and spent by the state governments. But two years after it became law on April 1, 2010, the RTE Act is yet to get off the ground with most state governments protesting the Centre’s 55:45 expenditure-sharing formula and pressing for a larger Central contribution.

“March 2013 is the deadline set in the RTE Act for fulfillment of several conditions — promoting new schools and upgrading the infrastructure of existing schools, adding classrooms and providing drinking water, toilets, etc. By 2015, the conditions regarding teacher-pupil ratios, teacher training, etc, need to be fulfilled. All this requires huge amounts of additional resources. The allocations made for RTE-SSA in Budget 2012-13 don’t indicate any urgency about realising these time-bound objectives. In secondary education, while there is an increased allocation of Rs.650 crore towards RMSA, the allocation for the national scheme for incentivising SC/ST community girl children to enter secondary education (SUCCESS) was slashed by nearly half, while allocation to the national means-cum-merit scholarship scheme remains unchanged. In a sense, there is nothing new worth mentioning in the budget. No tall or short promises are made. And no directions given for further development of Indian education,” says Prof. Jandhyala B.G. Tilak, head of the department of educational finance at the National University of Educational Planning and Administration (NUEPA), Delhi.

Prof. Tilak’s disappointment with Budget 2012-13 is echoed by Madhav Chavan, the Mumbai-based chief executive of India’s most well-known education NGO, Pratham (estb.1994), which reaches 3 million children in 17 states through its supplementary reading and basic maths programmes, and is the sole organisation countrywide measuring actual learning outcomes of children in primary education. According to Chavan, there’s been no real increase in Central funding for RTE-SSA or the education sector, as the finance minister has nominally raised the education outlay commensurate with increased tax revenue. “The Centre’s tax revenue has risen by 20 percent over 2009-10, and expenditure on education has remained static at 6 percent of tax revenue in the past two years. Moreover it must be noted that the outlay for RTE-SSA includes revenue derived from the 2 percent education cess, payable on all taxes levied by the Central government, which contributes Rs.21,670 crore of the RTE-SSA budget of Rs.25,555 crore. Basically SSA is funded by the 2 percent cess with the government topping this amount to maintain the 6 percent ratio of spending on education relative to the Centre’s tax revenue. No special or imaginative effort has been made to raise resources for education,” says Chavan.

Certainly Budget 2012-13 makes no assessment of the actual (and legitimate) needs of India’s 480 million children who should rightly receive early childhood nutritional care and quality education. Nevertheless Chavan believes that improving expenditure efficiency rather than higher outlay is the top priority in primary/elementary education. Prat-ham’s Annual Status of Education Report (ASER, first published in 2005) — the country’s first and only audit report of actual learning outcomes in primary schools in rural India — has revealed year-on-year that little learning happens in government primaries despite incrementally rising outlays. According to the recently published ASER 2011, which assessed 633,465 children in 558 rural districts countrywide, only 48.2 percent of class V students can read and understand class II texts, and only 61 percent of class V students can solve simple two-digit subtraction sums — functional illiteracy exacerbated by 30 percent of teachers of government rural primaries being absent on any given day. Unsurprisingly ASER 2011 indicates that “private school enrolment in most states is increasing although the Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 is in place. Over 25 percent of rural India’s children go to private schools and the numbers will rise in coming years,” predict the authors of the survey.

A clue to the curious paradox of the accelerating flight of children from low-income house-holds from free-of-charge government primaries to fees-levying private schools is provided by a recent report — PAISA (Planning, Allocations and Expenditures, Institutions: Studies in Accountability) — released by Pratham and Accountability Initiative, which reveals that 78 percent of Central and state government allocations for education during the past four years (2009-12) have been expended by way of higher teachers’ salaries and overheads with a mere 6 percent spent on student needs (books, uniforms, stationery, etc). The report says that even as per child allocation increased from Rs.2,004 in 2009-10 to Rs.4,269 in 2011-12, it has not led to improved learning outcomes as investment in teacher training, and children’s needs were under-prioritised in favour of events, overheads (white washing, fans, ICT equipment) and teachers’ remuneration.

Lack of accountability is a major problem which has — and continues — to bedevil India’s education system. Despite an estimated Rs.400,000 crore poured into the public education system during the past ten years by the Centre and thrice that amount by state govern-ments, there’s little to show for this vast sum by way of sharper learning outcomes in school education, research papers and/or invention breakthroughs in higher education. Successive finance ministers have failed and neglected to restructure the budget formulation and presentation process so that the public gets an idea of how the huge sum of Rs.1490,925 crore which passed through the national exchequer last year, was spent in terms of assets creation and improved results in international students assessment tests. Former Union finance minister and currently home minister P. Chidambaram, who famously admitted that “outlays don’t mean outcomes”, had promised that the Union government would start presenting parallel outcomes budgets seven years ago. It is yet to happen.

Against this backdrop of opaque government budgets which conceal more than they reveal, a growing number of monitors of the socio-economic scene are advocating radical overhaul of the budget formulation and presentation process to report major sectoral outcomes and government accountability. “Last year the Central and state governments together spent Rs.276,866 crore — 3.11 percent of GDP — on education. In 2012-13 the combined spending of the Centre and states on education is expected to rise to 3.5 percent of GDP. But higher outlays while necessary, are not sufficient. Both the Central and state governments need to re-assess the schemes on which huge amounts are being spent, in terms of outcomes generated. They need to present outcomes data together with financial statements every year in the interests of expenditure efficiency, transparency and accountability,” says Dr. K.R. Shanmugam, professor at the Madras School of Economics.

Reluctance to disclose outcomes and achievements for money spent apart, there’s also an obstinate refusal within the establishment to estimate the actual needs of the public education system. For the past decade, EducationWorld (estb.1999) has been a voice in the wilderness calling for a switch from incremental to needs-based budgeting, especially in the critically important primary-secondary education sector.

Yet such an honest assessment of the actual funding needs of the public education system — the finance minister and the establishment are perfectly aware that the middle class finances a substantial part of its own education through the country’s estimated 80,000 private primary-secondaries and self-financing profess-ional colleges — has never been made by the HRD ministry or by Indian academia.

In April 2008 and again in August 2009, together with Dr. A.S. Seetharamu, former professor of education at the Institute of Social and Economic Change (ISEC), Bangalore and currently education advisor to the Karnataka government, EducationWorld pres-ented a detailed schema to equip 1.05 million government elementary schools countrywide with a library, laboratory and lavatories — an obvious need. After eliminating the small minority of government schools already equipped with one or more of these essential facilities and calculating the costs thereof according to official norms, the aggregate expenditure required was assessed at Rs.53,386 crore — a sum equivalent to less than 1 percent of GDP last year.

“The 21.7 percent increased allocation for elementary education may sound impressive, but from a needs perspective, it falls far short of the requirement for universalisation of quality schooling. The Budget 2012-13 provision of Rs.61,427 crore is grossly inadequate for the needs of Indian education. Planning and budgeting for education has to move from an incremental through a needs-based to a rights-based approach. Moreover it’s not just the Central government which must increase its education spending; the country’s 28 state governments must also allocate more for education within their budgets. In fact, since over 90 percent of the country’s primary schools are run by state governments, the onus is upon them to ensure that a greater share of their budgetary resources is allocated to education. Currently the Centre spends 0.6 percent and the states together 2.2 percent of GDP on education. Both have to rise significantly to meet the 6 percent of GDP norm set by the Kothari Commission 46 years ago,” says Prof. Seetharamu.

While academics and educationists have given the education provisions made in Budget 2012-13 a big thumbs down, feedback from edupreneurs and chief executives of India’s fast-growing education corporates has been mostly positive, indicating their complete disconnect with the pressing needs of India’s public education system. (download to see box on Supplementary lib-lab-lav budget userfiles/88.pdf)

Budget 2012-13 is also a big disappointment for higher education. The Centre’s allocation for higher education — though 18 percent higher than last year — is a pitiful Rs.15,458 crore (less than 0.2 percent of GDP). In a country where a mere 12 percent of youth in the age group 18-24 is enrolled in higher education institutions (cf. 25 percent in China and over 60 percent in the US), the tertiary sector comprising 611 universities and 31,000 colleges deserves more attention from the finance minister. Moreover with a 2005 Nasscom-Mckinsey World Institute Study disclosing that 75 percent of contemporary India’s engineering and 85 percent of science, arts and commerce college graduates are “unemployable”, massive resources have to be mobilised for infrastructure and faculty develop-ment in higher education.

Perhaps the only innovation in Budget 2012-13 is the setting up of a Credit Guarantee Fund (CGF) which the finance minister hopes will increase the amount disbursed as education loans to students in higher education. Against the backdrop of an increasing percentage of education loans being declared NPAs (non-performing assets) by public sector banks, last year, an expert committee on education loans constituted by the Indian Banks Asso-ciation had recommended the creation of CGF. It is proposed that CGF will create a corpus with contributions from the banks and the Union government, from which bank claims will be settled.

Comments Girish Shah, senior manager of the public sector Union Bank of India, Mumbai: “CGF is applicable only for education loans of Rs.4 lakh and below for which no guarantor or collateral is required. The recovery of such loans is very poor and they’ve transformed into huge NPAs for banks. Our experience is that most students who have availed education loans find it difficult to get jobs even after two years, when they have to start repaying the loan. The education loan NPAs of Union Bank of India for 2011-12 total Rs.1,800-1,900 crore. The hope is that CGF will help reduce the NPAs of banks which will in turn definitely ease disbursement of loans to students.”

Fortunately a traditional blindspot of Indian education which has received attention and commitment from Mukherjee in Budget 2012-13 is vocational education and training (VET). In his otherwise uninspiring 2012 budget speech, Mukherjee reiterated the Union government’s commitment to the National Skill Development Council (NSDC), promoted in the public-private partnership mode, which since 2009 has approved 52 projects with an aggregate outlay of Rs.1,205 crore. At the end of ten years, these VET initiatives are expected to train and skill 62 million people. In Budget 2012-13 an additional Rs.1,000 crore has been allocated to the National Skill Development Fund.

“Every sector of the Indian economy is facing a severe crunch of skilled people. The news that NSDC has approved 52 projects which will train 62 million people will go a long way in filling the skills development gap,” says Sanjaya Sharma, chief executive officer of Tata Interactive Systems, Mumbai.

Another bright spot of an otherwise gloomy budget is the increased allocation for child nutrition progra-mmes. Against the backdrop of the Hunger Malnutrition Report released in early January, revealing that 42 percent of all children in the country suffer severe malnutrition, prompting prime minister Manmohan Singh to describe the situation as “a national shame”, public pressure was building on the government to act. Consequently the Prime Minister’s National Council recommended a multi-sectoral progra-mme to address maternal and child malnutrition in selected 200 high burden districts, to be rolled out in 2012-13. “In this context, Integrated Child Develop-ment Services (ICDS) is being strength-ened and re-structured. For 2012-13, an allocation of Rs.15,800 crore has been made as against Rs.10,000 crore in 2011-12. This amounts to an increase of over 58 percent,” said Mukherjee, also announcing an allocation of Rs.11,937 crore for the National Programme of Mid-Day Meals in Schools.

Nevertheless even while welcoming the 58 percent higher allocation for the Centre’s ICDS programme (administered by the Union ministry of women and child development), child rights activists and nutritionists believe the Rs.15,800 crore allocation falls far short of fulfilling the nutritional needs of 50 million children between ages three-five enrolled in 1.2 million anganwadis countrywide. For instance, a recent report relating to Karnataka (pop. 61 million) has revealed that under ICDS, a mere Rs.4 per child per day is allocated to fulfill her food and nutrition needs. Moreover there’s growing apprehension within educationists that a large proportion of the increased ICDS budget will go towards meeting the higher pay demands of anganwadi workers — in 2011-12, their remuneration was doubled from Rs.1,500 to Rs.3,000 per month, but could not be made effective because of fund constraints.

“Even the substantially increased ICDS allocation of Rs.15,800 crore is woefully inadequate to provide cooked, healthy and wholesome food and nutrition to the 50 million children accommodated in the country’s 1.2 million anganwadis, let alone the estimated 30 million children excluded from them. There’s a big danger that under-fed infants will grow into stunted children incapable of learning. Moreover no provision has been made for providing early childhood education in the anganwadis. My submission is that the country’s 1.2 million anganwadis must also offer preschool education to children to reap the socio-economic benefits of more mean years of schooling and higher adult literacy. If our children are not fed well and given early childhood education, India is staring at a bleak future in the new millennium,” warns Rita Sonawat, author and prof-essor of human resources development at SNDT Women’s University, Mumbai.

Once again like its 63 predecessor budgets, Budget 2012-13 has failed and neglected to provide adequately for the nurturance, education and development of the country’s most valuable and abundant resource — human capital, condemning the nation’s children and youth to second class status in the  globalised economy of the 21st century. With little pressure exerted by the middle class and Indian academia (who send their children to private schools) to revitalise and upgrade India’s public education system, successive govern-ments in Delhi are splurging swelling tax revenues on the pay and perks of bureaucrats, defence, unmerited subsidies, and recapitalisation of public sector banks and failing enterprises. For instance in Budget 2012-13 Mukherjee provided a massive Rs.193,407 crore for defence and Rs.190,015 crore as subsidies. More shockingly, potential tax revenue sacrificed by the Union government by way of tax cuts, concessions and incentives to industry aggregates Rs.487,000 crore. Yet the best he could do for education of India’s 480 million children was Rs.61,427 crore — a per capita provision of a mere Rs.1,365 per annum.

The standard excuse of the Central (and state) governments for shirking the national commitment and imper-ative to raise budgetary allocations for education to 6 percent of GDP is their massive revenue and fiscal deficits. Yet an unchallenged blueprint for the Central government to raise an additional Rs.100,000 crore annually for education has been repeatedly presented by EducationWorld, without any response from the Union HRD ministry, the prime minister or indeed any leader of the academy. Neither has the media or any of the gabbling Oxbridge-educated English language television news anchors who despite their reportedly $ 1 million (Rs.5 crore) annual pay packages receive complimentary copies of this publication, deemed the open, uninterrupted, and continuous neglect of public education a subject worth debating, except in passing.

For India’s political class drawn from the nation’s greedy self-serving middle class, the abysmally low quality education grudgingly dished out to the children of the poor majority in 1.25 million government primaries and estimated 100,000 secondaries, is a non-marketable, low-priority issue. Like the country’s poor majority classified as citizens who earn less than Rs.28.65 (US $0.5) per capita per day in urban India, and Rs.22.40 in the rural hinterland toiling unseen and unheard, so their children must trek to crumbling government schools without teachers, libraries, laboratories, lavatories, to learn best as they can.

With Autar Nehru (Delhi); Hemalatha Raghupathi (Chennai) & Jayanthi Mahalingam (Mumbai)