Chandan Srivastava
In the matter of budget, history repeats itself in strange ways. No matter how much the scene in front may change, some things remain the same in the budget. Take, for example, the allocation for education in the budget.
At this time just before the presentation of the budget, two things can be said with absolute certainty– one is that the allocation of funds for education is not going to be as much as it has always been expected and secondly that for education. Whatever may be the amount allocated in the head, but the amount to be spent is going to be less than that.
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If you want to solve this thing that seems like a puzzle, then remember the things of the budget presented last year. In the budget for the year 2021-22, an amount of Rs 93,224 crore was allocated to the Ministry of Education. It came in the newspapers that of the ten ministries to which the maximum amount has been allocated, the Ministry of Education is one (at the eighth position). It sounds good, but just think in this way that out of the total expenditure of the Central Government for the year 2021-22, how much amount did the Ministry of Education get to spend on its share? The amount contributed by the Ministry of Education was less than 3 percent of the total expenditure of the Central Government for the year 2021-22. The education ministry’s share came to just 2.67 per cent of the total central expenditure.
In the Economic Survey for the year 2019-20, it was said that during the last five years (2014-15 to 2018-19), the expenditure on education of both the central and state government has been only 3 percent of the total GDP of the country. Now if you want here, remember that in the National Education Policy of 1968, it was said that 6 percent of the country’s GDP should be spent on education, and this thing may seem old but its importance remains intact. It has also been reiterated in the new education policy of the year 2020 that the expenditure on education should be at least 6 percent of the GDP.
The requirement is six percent of the GDP, but our governments are unable to spend half of it for expenditure on education, and half of the amount that is available in front of this requirement. Meaning, some part of the amount earmarked for expenditure is returned to the treasury again without any use. This means, the money that had to go to the children’s plate under the mid-day meal scheme, the money was to be spent on the children’s school books and clothes, the money was to be used on the scholarship given to the meritorious students of the poor and deprived sections. Some part of it remained like this.
If you try to read the story of this unspent year after year in the mirror of the last decade, then it will be seen that only two years were such when 100 percent or more of the total amount allocated was spent on the item of education. (In the year 2010-11 the allocated amount was Rs 33,214 crore and spent was Rs 36,433 crore. Similarly, in the year 2017-18 the allocated amount was Rs 46,356 crore, the amount spent was Rs 46,600 crore).
Except for two years, there has not been any year between 2010-11 to 2020-21 when our governments have been able to spend the total amount allocated in the budget for education. The years 2013-14 and 2014-15 were such that even 90 percent of the total allocated amount could not be spent (89 percent in 2013-14 and 83 percent in 2014-15).
Perhaps you can test this time’s budget with the old question that whether more than 3 percent of GDP is allocated for education or not and whether our governments are able to spend 100 percent of the allocated amount. Your thinking like this is justified considering the experience of the last year.
In the last budget (2021-22), the amount allocated for education was less than the total amount allocated immediately before that i.e. in the year 2020-21. In the original budgetary allocation of the financial year 2020-21, an amount of Rs 99,311.52 crore was allocated to the Ministry of Education, that is, within a year, there was a reduction of Rs 6 thousand crore in the budget allocation for education (from 99 thousand crores to 93 thousand crores). ) Hui.
The biggest cut was in the budget of school education. Rs 54,873 crore was allocated in the head of school education in 2021-22, whereas in the previous budget (in 2020-21 Rs 59,845 crore was given in this head. Means, there was a total reduction of Rs 4,971 crore in the budget of school education. About one thousand crore rupees were cut in the budget of higher education within a year. 38,350 crores were allocated in the head of higher education in 2021-22, whereas in the budget of higher education (2020-21) immediately before this. 39,466 crore was allocated in the
But in the last two years, the question of budgetary allocation in the context of education has changed. To recognize this changed question, remember the month of August of 2021. Then a statement by former Reserve Bank of India governor and renowned economist Raghuram Rajan was in the news. Raghuram Rajan, while targeting the schools closed during the Coronabandi era, said that if there is a further delay in opening the schools, then the country will have to bear the brunt of it for the next several decades.
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Raghuram Rajan argued that during the time of Coronabandi, the education of children was interrupted for one and a half years. The quality of education they are getting online is questionable. In such a situation, the problem is not only that the children’s education is stalled or is not happening at full speed, but the problem is that the children are forgetting their earlier learning. In this sequence, Raghuram Rajan had said that if you stay out of school for one and a half years, it means that you are three years behind in terms of your studies by the time you reach school again.
You may not find Raghuram Rajan’s argument of ‘one and a half years out of school, three years behind in studies’ in the midst of Coronabandi, in your mathematics, but the real concern hidden behind this argument cannot be denied. The real concern is that in the midst of the havoc of COVID-19, we are now lagging behind in the progress we had made in recent years in the case of children of school going age.
Like last year, this time too, before the presentation of the budget, schools and colleges are closed and the arrangements made for online education as an alternative are insufficient. A community engagement platform called LocalCircles, in a survey in July 2021, found that 80 per cent of parents are unhappy with the online education being provided to their children. These parents had to say that online teaching is not successful in teaching the lessons to the children.
It is not only that online education is unable to teach the lessons to the children properly, a large number of children are either dropping out of school or forced to change their schools amidst the troubles created by the coronabandi. After the phased removal of the lockdown, a new scene emerged when the schools opened.
According to the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2021, the enrollment of children in government schools in rural areas of the country increased by 65 to 70 percent, while the enrollment of children in private schools decreased by 24 to 28 percent, during the period of Coronabandi. According to the report, 62 percent of the survey respondents (which include teachers and principals of government schools) said that due to the economic crisis created during the Coronabandi period, parents were forced to drop their children’s names from private schools and write them in government schools.
It is nave to be content with the assumption that come on, private schools are not right, government schools are right, children are studying somewhere or the other. It has been revealed in many surveys that most of the government schools are not able to arrange online education for the children. Secondly, it is also to be remembered that being enrolled in school does not mean that children are attending the school offline or online and are learning their prescribed lessons properly.
In such a situation, the families of the deprived sections are in the most plight whose children are being forced to drop out of school. For example, according to Madhya Pradesh’s Commission for Protection of Child Rights (MPCPCR), a total of 40,000 children from Class I to Class XII dropped out of school during the second wave of COVID-19 in four tribal-dominated districts of the state. Among them, there were ten and a half thousand children who, along with their parents, migrated elsewhere in search of livelihood.
To put it briefly, one wave after another of Covid has fundamentally changed the face of school and university education. Some students are leaving studies, some students are changing schools due to financial crisis and some students are lagging behind in studies due to lack of necessary resources for online studies.
Against this changed scenario, of course, the Finance Minister can count that in the year 2020-21, the Central Government gave Rs 818 crore to the states for the promotion of online education and Rs 268 crore for the purpose of providing necessary training to teachers for online education. The Economic Survey (2020-21) can be counted from the fact that the number of smartphone students studying in government and private schools in rural areas increased from 36.5 percent in 2018 to 61.8 percent in 2020.
It can be argued that if offline education is at a standstill, then initiatives like PM eVidya have been started for online education, which provides e-content through a web portal named DIKSHA and education programs are being telecasted through Swayam Prabha channel. . Also, online courses are being run in the name of Swayam MOOCs.
But these initiatives are insufficient in the changed scenario of Coronabandi, this has been proved in many surveys and the challenge in this year’s budget for the Finance Minister is to take some such measures on the education front that the achievements on the education front in the last one and a half decade. I have been achieved, let us not wash our hands of them.
(The author is a socio-cultural scholar)