Public Spending on Education in India*
The
failure of the Indian state more than six decades after Independence
to provide universal access to quality schooling, and to ensure equal
access to higher education among all socio-economic groups and across
gender and region, must surely rank among the more dismal and significant
failures of the development project in the country. It is not only that
the expansion of literacy and education has been far too slow, halting
and even geographically limited. It is also that educational provision
itself remains highly differentiated in both quantitative and qualitative
terms.
There
are huge differences in access to both schooling and higher education
across location (rural/urban or state), economic category and social
group, as well as by gender. And there are very significant variations
in quality of institution across different schools, colleges and universities,
which mean that the experience of education is very different for different
students.
These differences in quality cannot be simplified into government or
public versus private as is quite commonly done in journalistic discourse:
there are some very good government schools and some terrible private
schools; and in general public higher educational institutions perform
much better than private ones. All the so-called ''institutions of excellence''
in higher education are publicly created and publicly funded institutions.
Rather, the differences in quality often unfortunately reinforce differences
on the basis of location and social divisions.
Thus, institutions in backward areas and in educationally backward states
tend to be both underfunded and of poorer quality than institutions
in metros or in more educationally developed states. Rural schools are
often worse than urban schools (although once again, this is not inevitable)
and schools catering to elite or middle class children tend to be better
than schools for urban poor serving slum children or rural schools serving
the children of agricultural labourers. Schools with dominantly upper
caste children also tend to provide better services than schools mostly
catering to SC or ST or Muslim children. School with only girl students
are more likely to be deficient in basic facilities, including toilets
and fans in classrooms, as well as teaching aids. And so on.
These differences in quality of schooling have significant implications,
because they do not simply affect the quality of education per se, they
also affect chances of entry into higher education and the possibilities
of socio-economic advancement that come from such entry.
Thus, access of deprived social groups is adversely affected not only
by sheer quantitative variations, but also by differences in quality
of schooling. Since this acts as a filtering process for further education,
it is not surprising that evidence of exclusion grows as one goes up
the education ladder. Obviously intelligence and merit must be normally
distributed in society. So these very strong indicators of differential
access to higher education across social groups do not reflect actual
differences in the innate quality of aspiring students, but socio-economic
discrimination that reduces the chances of many meritorious students
even as it privileges the children of the elite who have access to ''better''
schooling. This is why the process of democratising even higher education
cannot proceed very far without ensuring much more equitable social
access to good quality schooling.
All this, in turn, is critically determined in the first instance by
public funding. It is difficult, if not impossible, to impart quality
education ''on the cheap''. You cannot ensure quality without reasonably
good infrastructure, sufficient numbers of trained and adequately compensated
teachers, other amenities and teaching aids, including access to new
technologies that are becoming an essential part of contemporary life.
Yet the attempts to universalise school education have all too often
been associated with just such a tendency, relying on underpaid ''parallel''
teachers, who in turn are forced to function with completely inadequate
infrastructure and lack of even basic facilities.
Ensuring a reasonable quality of education to all children – and thereby
also ensuring a greater democratisation of the entire process - necessarily
requires a significant expansion of the resources to be provided to
elementary school education. It is not just the need to expand the system
to cover all children, as described in the Right to Education Act, which
determines this. It is also because existing institutions have to be
upgraded so that they qualify as schools providing good quality education.
This is even more important because of the need to upgrade the ''Education
Centres'' that are operating in many states to proper schools that meet
all the norms in terms of trained teachers, minimum facilities, etc.
Also, in the urge to increase the coverage of secondary education, many
primary schools are being upgraded to secondary school status, without
provision of sufficient teachers, rooms and other pedagogical requirements,
such as provision for specialised subject teachers, science labs, counselling
etc. This severely comprises on the quality of such secondary school
education.
This is the context in which public expenditure on schooling must be
assessed. This is not something that the current government is unaware
of: indeed, from UPA-1 onwards, the necessity for greater public spending
on education has been openly acknowledged in official quarters. The
National Common Minimum Programme of UPA-1 pledged to raise public spending
in education to least 6 per cent of GDP with at least half this amount
being spent of primary and secondary sectors. While there was some increase
in central government expenditure, this particular goal was nowhere
near being achieved in the first tenure of the UPA, with public spending
on education remaining at around 4 per cent of GDP, and certainly well
below 5 per cent. The second tenure of the UPA has even been marginally
worse, with no significant increase in allocations for education.
As evident from Chart 1, this is an embarrassingly low ration even by
the standards of other developing countries. It is less than a quarter
of the equivalent ratio in Cuba, but even well below the percentage
of public spending on education to GDP in countries like Kenya, Malawi
and Ethiopia. And despite the UPA's promises and recent endeavours,
the ratio in India is still substantially below that of the weighted
average of all the countries in the world.
To make matters worse, instad of providing a big increase in funding
for school education, the central government (UPA-2) has actually retracted
by reducing its commitment on Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan from 75 per cent
to 50 per cent. This is a big blow, not only for those states where
school education is still far from universal, but also in other state
where there is pressing need for more funds to improve the quality of
schooling.
Chart
2 shows that state governments taken together are currently spending
around 14 per cent of the total expendtiure on education at all levels,
a decrease from the level of a decade ago but an increase compared to
the middle years of the previous decade. But the central government's
declared desire to increase education spending is barely reflected at
all in the budgetary figures, and the amount spent on education remains
a shockingly low proportion of total public spending.
Of course it is true that resources alone are not enough. There are
many other changes and reforms required in our school and higher education
systems: greater decentralisation, greater flexibility, changing patterns
of examination, different and more creative and relevant teacher training,
and so on. But significantly higher levels of public funding are the
necessary precondition for any other reforms to be successful, and indeed
to even dare to hope for improved quality of education.
Surprisingly,
even this rather obvious conclusion has become a matter of debate in
India at present. It is generally agreed that more resources are required
for education, but there are arguments that instead of relying on more
public funding, there should be greater freedom granted to private provision
of education. According to this view, there is no reason for the state
to get into education provision, and instead it should focus on creating
an ''enabling environment'' for private provision, even if necessary
by recognising the possibility of profit-making investment in education
as in Singapore.
There are several levels of response to this argument. First, the significant
presence of positive externalities in education (which means that the
benefits of providing education extend beyond the agent that is spending
the resources, to society as a whole) means that if it is left only
to private hands it will be significantly underprovided, and poor children
in backward areas, for example, will simply not be reached.
In any case there are good reasons why commercialisation of education
is actually prohibited by law in India (even though it is – as with
so many other laws – often more honoured in the breach). The possibility
of being exploited by unscrupulous private providers who take advantage
particularly of those who do not have the access to information or training
that would allow them to discriminate, is very high. That is why the
explicit legal and official focus has been to encourage charitable institutions
like trusts and educational societies to provide private education.
This has not prevented all sorts of other private education institutions
from coming up, and naturally there is immense variation. There are
excellent institutions with very good track record, inclduing those
which are actively engaged in affirmative action to ensure greater access
of underprivileged children. At the opposite end, there are crammed
tutorial centres and hole-in-the-wall teaching shops masquerading as
''English medium'' schools to profit from the unmet hunger for education
that is so marked across India.
A recent survey (India Human Development Survey 2010) of 41,554 households
across India allows us to compare the incidence of private schooling
and the relative costs of such schooling across states. The results
are shown in the accompanying table, from which several interesting
features emerge. The ratio of private enrolment in schools for children
aged 6-14 years varies dramatically across states, from a low of 6 per
cent in Assam to a high of 52 per cent in Punjab. While both Punjab
and haryana have high ratios of privatisation of schooling, it is not
as if this feature is otherwise strongly correlated with per capita
income in the state. Nor is it that private education is always greater
where public education is less funded (defined by the per capita annual
total expenses in Government schools), or even where the gap between
public and private funding is large.
What is clear from the table is that per captia expenditure is a critical
variable in affecting quality. Thus Kerala, which is generally acknowledged
to have a good government schooling system, has one of the highest per
capita spending values. The highest was found in Himachal Pradesh, which
is one of the great recent success stories of school education, and
has achieved universal and good quality school education despite being
a relatively less wealthy state and having to deal with difficult terrain
and logistical constraints. The table reinforces the point that to ensure
quality, raising the level of public expenditure in education is absolutely
essential.
Table
1: Schooling costs for children aged 6-14 years |
||||||
Private
school enrolment (%) |
Annual
total expenses per student (Rs) |
|||||
Government
|
Private
|
|||||
All
India |
28 |
688 |
2920 |
|||
Andhra
Pradesh |
31 |
574 |
3260 |
|||
Assam |
6 |
371 |
1636 |
|||
Bihar |
18 |
704 |
2466 |
|||
Chhattisgarh |
15 |
317 |
2039 |
|||
Delhi |
28 |
1044 |
5390 |
|||
Gujarat |
22 |
766 |
4221 |
|||
Haryana |
47 |
1043 |
4372 |
|||
Himachal
Pradesh |
19 |
1709 |
6273 |
|||
Jammu
and Kashmir |
47 |
1045 |
3719 |
|||
Jharkhand |
32 |
502 |
2932 |
|||
Karnataka |
28 |
638 |
3848 |
|||
Kerala |
31 |
1537 |
3259 |
|||
Madhya
Pradesh |
27 |
333 |
1935 |
|||
Maharashtra,
Goa |
20 |
599 |
2370 |
|||
North-East |
34 |
1441 |
4237 |
|||
Orissa |
8 |
612 |
2851 |
|||
Punjab |
52 |
1444 |
5160 |
|||
Rajasthan |
32 |
676 |
2612 |
|||
Tamil
Nadu |
23 |
606 |
3811 |
|||
Uttar
Pradesh |
43 |
427 |
1733 |
|||
Uttarakhand |
27 |
972 |
3422 |
|||
West
Bengal |
10 |
1136 |
5045 |
|||
Source:
Human Development in India: Challenges for a society in transition,
OUP 2010, page 84. |
||||||
All
this is especially important now that the Right to Education has become
enshrined in law. If the central government is really serious about
this, it must put its money where its mouth is.
* This article was originally published in The Business Line on 14 June,
2011