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AT THE END OF THIS MONTH, Union finance minister Arun Jaitley will present the first budget of the second BJP-led NDA government at the Centre following the rout of the Congress-led UPA government which (mis)ruled India for two consecutive five-year terms (2004-2014). Although Jaitley presented the Union budget 2014-15 last July shortly after the new government was sworn in, it had all the markings of a status quo interim budget. Now as he prepares to present the first fully-fledged Union budget of the BJP/NDA government, he has the opportunity to do justice to India’s beleaguered education sector and set it on the road to comprehensive reform.
Although it’s fanciful to expect the finance minister to fulfill the BJP manifesto’s pledge to raise public spending on education to 6 percent of GDP which would require the Centre’s outlay of Rs.68,728 crore in 2014-15 — equivalent to 0.24 percent of GDP — to increase ten times to reach 2 percent of GDP (the rest to be contributed by state governments), Jaitley should at least mobilise and allocate an additional Rs.109,507 crore for education on the capital account to make all 1.45 million government primaries countrywide compliant with s.19 and Schedule of the Right to Free & Compulsory Education (RTE) Act, 2009. 
Ever since the RTE Act was unanimously — and belatedly — passed by Parliament in 2009 following an enabling amendment of the Constitution (Article 21-A) to make it obligatory for the state to provide free and compulsory elementary (class I-VIII) education to all children in the 6-14 age group, political populism, judicial activism, NGO interest, bureaucratic manipulations, proclamations of government-friendly academia and aspirations of underserved populations and village communities have been aroused by RTE hype. But this hype has proved to be an over-sized bubble. Enabling legislation which promised to be a radical game-changer in Indian education in 2009 has remained a non-starter five years after the RTE Act became operational on April 1, 2010.
However a positive feature of the RTE Act is that it defines a model school in s.19 and specifies norms and standards for quality schooling in the Schedule of the Act. These norms include teacher-pupil ratios, classroom strength, physical infrastructure and academic facilities required for meaningful teaching-learning transactions.
Inevitably, the model school prescribed in the Schedule of the Act has cost implications. As reported in the latest ‘flash statistics’ of the District Information for School Education (DISE), a unit of the Delhi-based NUEPA, the great majority of government primary-upper primary/elementary schools are way behind the specifications prescribed by the Schedule. Therefore, a substantial but not impossible one-time capital expenditure effort is required to satisfy RTE Act norms and standards as detailed in s.19 and the Schedule.
A comprehensive calculus of the one-time capital expenditure required to make all government schools RTE Act compliant — after taking into account already installed facilities — is set out above.
I don’t believe a one-time resource mobilisation effort of Rs.110,000 crore to place government elementaries back on track is a tall order. Several options are available to a government serious about addressing the country’s glaring education deficit. Among them, a global sell-out of loss-making public sector enterprises, diversion of funds from telecom spectrum auctions, limiting foreign jaunts of ministers and parliamentarians, and marginally increasing the education cess payable by direct tax payers.
Where’s there’s a will there’s a way. Although quadrupling the Centre’s expenditure on education may be too tall an order for the BJP government, it can make a new beginning by transforming the RTE Act from a dead letter and investing it with pith and substance by making all languishing government schools RTE compliant through a one-time expenditure as outlined above.
(Dr. A.S. Seetharamu is former professor of education, ISEC, Bangalore and education advisor to the Karnataka state government)