Dear Prime Minister,
Last August, in this space I wrote an open letter to finance minister Pranab Mukherjee suggesting ways and means in which your government’s budgetary outlay for the education of India’s 450 million children — the world’s largest child population — could be substantially raised in fiscal 2010-11, in the long term national interest. Expectedly, I didn’t receive a reply from Mr. Mukherjee, or for that matter from Indian academia. But this is too important an issue to be ignored. Therefore this year I’m going over the finance minister’s head and writing to you directly to seize the initiative and ensure that the thrust of next year’s budget is the education and health of India’s 450 million children below age 18. It’s neither good politics nor good ethics to ignore them just because they are not eligible to vote.
In the Union budget presented to Parliament and the nation on February 26 which proposes to spend a massive sum of Rs.1108,000 crore for national development purposes, the best you could do was budget a sum of Rs.42,036 crore, equivalent to 3.79 percent of your government’s total annual expenditure in fiscal 2010-11, for school and higher education. This grudging allocation aggregates to a mere 0.68 percent of the projected GDP (Rs.6164,178 crore) of 2010-11. And you are undoubtedly well aware that the most India’s 29 profligate state governments can do for education is to allocate another 2 percent of GDP (Rs.123,000 crore). Which means that the aggregate allocation (Centre plus states) for education will slip below the 3 percent of GDP plimsol line against the global average of 5 percent.
As any housewife with ordinary prudence and foresight will aver, budgeting a mere 3.79 percent of household expenditure for children’s education is much too parsimonious and a great disservice to the next generation. Most middle class households set aside 10-15 pecent for that purpose. Therefore the provision for education in Budget 2010 should have been over Rs.100,000 crore.
Whenever such meaningful outlays are proposed for education (and health), the usual cry is paucity of resources and the huge fiscal deficits of the Central and state governments. Yet the plain truth is that there is considerable hidden wealth in the Indian economy. According to a Morgan Stanley Research study, the current market value of government companies (including unlisted enterprises) is a massive Rs.2003,000 crore. And given that most of them are nests of corruption and bleeding heavily, why won’t your government expand your disinvestment programme and auction away public sector companies to raise an additional Rs.100,000 crore per year for dedicated investment into education and child care? How come your conscience is unmoved by reports indicating that 46 percent of the country’s under-5 children are severely malnourished, and that 53 percent of government primary school children drop out before class VIII? Instead your government is preoccupied with periodically re-capitalising beyond-redemption PSEs such as Air-India, public sector banks and myriad failed enterprises from government’s tax revenue and huge borrowals.
Sir, when the history of 21st century India is written, you will have a place of honour within it for having engineered the liberalisation and deregulation of Indian industry in July 1991. Now in the evening of your life, you have another great opportunity to seal your place of honour in history by pushing through a similar initiative to rejuvenate the public education system and engineer the liberalisation and deregulation of Indian education, which is so patently in the national interest. If you fail to seize this opportunity again next year, the sin of omission will vitiate your great achievements as Union finance minister in July 1991. It’s sad but true: the evil that men do lives after them, but the good is interred with their bones.
