The price of learning
India has increasingly taken charge of financing its education schemes, but are citizens getting good returns for the investment? The numbers show that the new administration will have its work cut out for it in improving outcomes.
Despite being a long way off from spending the recommended minimum of 6 per cent of its GDP on education (just over 3 per cent in 2014), allocations for the sector have grown substantially over the past decade. The Central government’s allocation has grown nearly eight times in the past decade from Rs. 11,000 crore in the 2004-05 Budget to over Rs. 82,400 crore in the 2014-15 one. Two-thirds of the allocation for the sector goes to school education.
For school education, India’s flagship schemes are the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan, the primary education flagship scheme initiated in 2001; the Rashtriya Madhyamik Shiksha Abhiyaan (RMSA) started in 2009 to tackle secondary education; and the Mid-Day Meal scheme started in 1995 and gradually expanded. Between them, they account for 85 per cent of India’s school education budget and are credited with helping the nation achieve universal primary school enrolment ahead of the 2015 Millennium Development Goals deadline.
How does India pay for these big-ticket schemes?
In its first Budget after coming to power in 2004, the UPA introduced an education cess of 2 per cent as a “tax-on-tax” applicable to corporation, income, customs, excise and service tax, in line with a promise made in its Common Minimum Programme. “The whole of the amount collected as cess will be earmarked for education, which will naturally include providing a nutritious cooked mid-day meal. If primary education and the nutritious cooked meal scheme can work hand in hand, I believe there will be a new dawn for the poor children of India,” the then Finance Minister, P. Chidambaram, said in his speech. After coming back to power in 2009, the UPA-II added an additional 1 per cent cess for secondary and higher education.
Over Rs 2.3 lakh crore has been collected through the education cess since its introduction, Budget documents for the past 10 years show. This education cess, paid by income-tax payers and consumers of many goods and services, now substantially funds India’s major education projects.
In 2014-15, the government will collect an estimated Rs. 33,818 crore through its primary education cess, accounting for over 80 per cent of the amount it will spend on the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan and the mid-day meal scheme, Budget documents show.
As tax-payers have become the direct financiers of these education schemes, India’s reliance on foreign funding has fallen. Ten years ago, foreign funding agencies accounted for over 10 per cent of India’s allocation on education; today that figure is down to 1 per cent, the documents show. The World Bank and the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development contributed Rs. 625 crore towards the RMSA this year, and the European Union gave Rs. 225 crore to the SSA. In comparison, the primary education cess will raise nearly Rs. 33,000 crore this year and the secondary and higher education cess will raise over Rs. 6,000 crore, dwarfing foreign aid.
But are Indians getting the bang for their buck? Enrolment may be near-universal at the primary school level, but both teacher and student attendance are low — 73 per cent and 60 per cent, respectively, in 2012, according to a study by Educational Consultants of India. Once past primary school, enrolment falls precipitously to 67 per cent in secondary schools and just 20 per cent for higher education, according to government data.
Most crucially, there isn’t yet evidence that children are learning enough in school. According to the National Assessment Survey conducted by the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT), fewer than two out of three students in Class III can read and understand a passage and fewer than two out of three can do simple division. Moreover, the numbers have not got better despite the big spending push, in 2007, the Annual Status of Education Report brought out by the NGO Pratham showed that 25 per cent of rural children in Class V could not do a simple subtraction. By 2013, the figure got worse — now 40 per cent of the children could not subtract one two-digit number from another.
