In the bleak Dickensian world of public education, like Oliver Twist, abandoned children in the government school system, want — and deserve — more. But as in the preceding 63 Union budgets presented to Parliament since independence, Budget 2011-12 once again denies the world’s largest child population an equitable share of national resources. Dilip Thakore reports
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Expression of EducationWorld’s disappointment with the Union budget every year has become as predictable an annual rite as its presentation to Parliament and the nation by successive finance ministers. For over a decade since this education-focused publication was launched with the mission to “build the pressure of public opinion to make education the No.1 item on the national agenda”, it has lamented missed opportunities to provide generously — even munificently — for the education of the world’s largest — and most high-potential — population of children and youth.
The presentation of the Union Budget 2011-12 to Parliament and the expectant nation by finance minister Pranab Mukherjee on February 28 offered no opportunity to break with EW’s lament tradition. Typically unmindful of the demographic profile of the nation, while presenting his sixth Union budget, Mukherjee congratulated himself and the scandals-tainted Congress-led second UPA (UPA-II) government for having “moved ahead with steady steps on the chosen path of fiscal consolidation and high economic growth in 2010-11”. Professing aware-ness that “universalising access to secondary education, increasing the percentage of our scholars in higher education and providing skills training is necessary”, he claimed credit — and received Parliament and society’s approbation — for raising the Centre’s allocation for education by 24 percent over last fiscal to Rs.52,057 crore in 2011-12. Curiously this claim for having provided handsomely for education hasn’t been challenged by any of the economist-pundits, business analysts and bright lights of Indian academia routinely invited to comment upon the budget in the press and television chat shows.
Surprisingly none of the media pundits nor Mukherjee who claimed awareness that “over 70 percent of Indians will be of working age in 2025” thought it worthy of mention that the Central government’s budgetary provi-sion of Rs.52,057 crore for education in toto — primary, secondary and tertiary — aggregates to a mere 0.58 percent of the country’s GDP (gross domestic product) projected at Rs.8980,860 crore in 2011-12. Assuming that the country’s 28 state governments and seven Union territories together mobilise another Rs.307,178 crore for education within their jurisdictions, to scale it up to 4 percent of GDP — a tall assum-ption — the national expenditure on education will aggregate Rs.359,235 crore (US $80 billion — unadjusted for PPP) this year. Against this, the annual public (government) expendi-ture on education in the US is $815 billion; $138 billion in China; $86 billion in Russia; and $119 billion in Britain (pop. 60 million). Moreover given the fact that 21st century India grudgingly hosts the contemporary world’s largest child and youth population (550 million), the per capita allocation for nurturing this much-proclaimed ‘demographic dividend’ (Rs.6,531 per year) would be laughable, if it wasn’t tragic.
Although his 110 minutes-long budget speech drew applause from treasury benches for “revising the opera-tional norms” of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA, primary education for all) programme to implement the Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 (aka RTE Act) which makes it mandatory for the State (Central, state and local governments) to provide free and compulsory education to all children between ages six-14 with effect from April 1, 2010, and increased the SSA/RTE allocation from Rs.15,000 crore last year to Rs.21,000 crore in Budget 2011-12, quite obviously this allocation “which is 40 percent higher” is still inadequate for the purpose.
According to conservative estimates, to implement infrastructure upgradation and the teacher-pupil norm of 1:30 stipulated by the RTE Act, an annual provision of Rs.48,169 crore per year is needed with Rs.27,169 crore required to be mobilised and expended by the country’s near-bankrupt state governments, already up in arms against the Centre’s 55:45 expenditure-sharing formula. Neither the enhanced provision for SSA-RTE nor steady progress in establishing a National Knowledge Network to link 1,500 institutes of higher learning, promotion of a National Innovation Council chaired by former National Knowledge Commission chairman Sam Pitroda, and special grants to over a dozen institutions of higher education including IIT-Kharagpur and IIM-Calcutta announced in Budget 2011-12, has impressed knowledgeable monitors of Indian academia.
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Yet perhaps the most telling comment on the inadequacy of provision for education in Budget 2011-12 is the deafening silence from Shastri Bhavan, headquarters of the Union HRD ministry presided over by Kapil Sibal, who following the national outcry over the 2G spectrum allocation scandal, which culminated in the resignation and arrest of former Union telecom and IT minister A. Raja in February, has also been allotted the telecom portfolio. Usually more than willing to provide sound-bytes to television channels and the mainstream press (although not to EducationWorld), Sibal who famously described the loss suffered by the national exchequer pursuant to Raja selling off 2G spectrum to crony capitalists for paltry amounts — and calculated by the comptroller and auditor general of India at a humungous Rs.176,000 crore — as “notional” in a television interview, has been unusually reticent on the subject of allocations made for education in Budget 2011-12.
Indeed recently under heavy fire from his own party back-benchers for initiating hastily drafted education legislation which is enmeshed in legal tangles, Sibal has conspicuously refrained from commenting on the issue on television, his favourite medium for airing his views. About the only public comment he made on the Union budget was on March 9 while inaugurating the annual three-day Emerging Directions in Global Education (EDGE) conference in Delhi when he indirectly pooh-poohed the 24 percent increase in the Central government’s outlay for education this fiscal as irrelevant. “A 24 percent budget hike will not help the education sector. It is not just money allocation that we need, the country needs a change in mindsets involved in teaching, the quality of education and the education provider,” said Sibal in a remark which is widely being interpreted as rubbishing Mukherjee’s claim to have made a special resource allocation effort for school education this year. Predictably, a shower of fax, telephone and e-mail messages rained on Sibal by EducationWorld to elicit his opinion on Budget 2011-12 remained unacknow-ledged and unanswered.
Nevertheless some informed educa-tionists are inclined to discern positive aspects in the provision made for education in Budget 2011-12. “For the first time ever, the allocation made for education in Budget 2011-12 has been made within the framework of a normative plan. This time round the Central government obtained estimates for implementing RTE and SSA from all state governments which has aggre-gated Rs.48,169 crore in 2011-12 and is estimated at Rs.231,233 crore over the five-year period 2011-12 to 2014-15. Against this, the Union Budget 2011-12 has provided Rs.21,000 crore for RTE/SSA which although a 25 percent increase over last year, is still Rs.6,000 crore short of the Centre’s 55 percent commitment. Yet this is a significant improvement over the allocations made for elementary education by the Centre in previous budgets,” says Dr. A.S. Seetharamu, former professor of education at the Institute of Social and Economic Change, Bangalore (estb. 1974) and currently education advisor to the Karnataka state government.
Although Dr. Seetharamu discerns the emergence of needs-based resource mobilisation for elementary education in Budget 2011-12, he nonetheless admits that even by the modest normative standards of the Union HRD ministry, the Centre’s allocation for elementary education of Rs.21,000 crore is Rs.6,000 crore short. Yet it is pertinent to note that in an exhaustive study undertaken for EducationWorld last year (EW April 2010) he had assessed the capex required to equip every government primary countrywide in need of basic lib-lav-lab (library, lavatory and laboratory) and related facilities at Rs.99,908 crore.
But such detailed analyses investigating the actual needs of public K-12 schools to meaningfully educate the world’s largest child popu-lation, are rare. On the whole, the Indian intelligentsia is curiously content to acquiesce with modest incremental annual outlays for public education which make no significant impact upon the 1.25 million government schools countrywide characterised by pathetically inadequate infrastructure, chronic teacher truancy and abysmal learning outcomes. This year also, the talking heads of television and print medium pundits were content to accept Mukherjee’s 24 percent higher allocation for education as manna from heaven.
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This indifference and apathy of the Indian intelligentsia to the inadequate and abysmal education dispensed by government primary and secondary schools which have over 60 percent of the country’s school-going children on their muster rolls, conceals a guilty secret of post-independence India. It is that middle class India has completely bypassed the nation’s 1.26 million government K-12 schools and has en masse enroled its children in the country’s 294,862 ‘recognised’ private — including 175,885 independent — primary and secondary schools. Conseq-uently, since the progeny of the country’s influential 200 million-strong middle class — the intelli-gentsia included — has access to private schooling, it is indifferent to the public/govern-ment school system which has been taken over by a new class of neo-literate politicians in state capitals who have run it into the ground.
Hell-bent upon extracting maximum rents, cuts and commi-ssions and packing them with under-qualified kith and kin as relatively well-paid teachers, administrators and inspectors, they have ruined the public education system in the states with the tacit consent if not connivance, of the intelligentsia. Indeed with middle class approval, government schools have been converted into education experi-mental labs and happy hunting grounds of this new genre of amoral politicians who have reduced politics to the lowest common denominator in the country’s 28 states and seven Union territories.
The boycott of the government school system by the middle class and its abandonment to the untender mercies of déclassé career-politicians and greedy bureaucrats in the states bodes ill for the nation as teaching-learning standards and learning outcomes are plumbing new depths. According to the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2010 — the sole audit of primary education learning outcomes in 522 rural districts (out of the country’s 631 total districts) — recently published by the highly-respected Mumbai-based NGO Pratham, 47 percent of class V students of government rural primaries can’t read class II texts and 64 percent of them can’t manage simple division sums. Which is hardly surprising given that 30 percent of teachers employed in government schools are absent on any given day.
Moreover such is the scale of administrative and supervisory neglect that although 90 percent of rural elementaries have been provided with toilet facilities, according to ASER 2010, they are in usable condition in only half of them, and only 37 percent of the separate toilets constructed for girl children in the 13,000 sample rural schools countrywide visited by the 25,000 ASER volunteers, were in usable condition. Thanks to the indifference of the middle class and intelligentsia to public K-12 education, despite an estimated Rs.1,000,000 crore poured into the country’s 1.25 million government primary schools over the past decade, there’s precious little to show for it by way of development of the national human resource pool (see special report feature ‘ASER 2010: Shocking primary learning report card’ — EW March 2011).
The pain of this foolish neglect of public primary education is transmitted all the way up the education chain into institutions of higher learning. Accor-ding to a 2005 NASSCOM-McKinsey World Institute study, 75 percent of engineering and 85 percent of arts, commerce and science college graduates in India are unemployable in multinational companies. Which is bad news for the fast-track Indian economy growing at 8 percent annually, and especially Indian industry currently suffering an acute shortage of skilled personnel and lumbered with the highest employee training costs worldwide.
Manish Sabharwal, promoter-chairman of the Bangalore-based TeamLease Services Pvt. Ltd (estb. 2004) — the country’s largest staffing company (annual revenue Rs.800 crore; headcount 80,000) — which hires, trains and ‘leases’ personnel to Indian industry, is unimpressed with the 24 percent increase in the outlay for education in Budget 2011-12 (“consumed by inflation”). According to him, the Indian middle class and intelligentsia has cut the ground from beneath its own feet by its indifference to public K-12 education.
“Given its access to private schools, the middle class and intelligentsia have opted out of government schools and public services in general. But with over 60 percent of children countrywide attending government schools, this is self-defeating because poor quality foundational education dispensed by these schools has transformed India into a low productivity economy. The Nehruvian education model chara-cterised by a few islands of academic excellence in a sea of mediocre, low-performance government schools and colleges hasn’t worked and today the Indian economy is confronted with a major crisis of the 3Es — education, employment and employability. For India to emerge as a front-rank economic nation, the public K-12 education system needs urgent reform and upgradation under the active supervision of the middle class and intelligentsia,” says Sabharwal.
Yet beyond middle class indifference to the quality of education being dispensed in 1.26 million government schools countrywide, the root cause of the malaise afflicting public education is the ideological reluctance of Indian academia and the intelligentsia to accept the plain truth that during the past 60 years, the country’s state — even if not the Central — governments have proved themselves unfit to deliver quality education to the nation’s 350 million children of school-going age. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the Indian intelligentsia conti-nues to believe that state government educrats can and will rise to the occasion and substantially improve learning outcomes in the country’s 1.26 million government primary schools. Hence the nationwide conspiracy of silence on entertaining any alternatives to government-provided education to children of the socio-economically disadvantaged and voiceless majority who can’t access private education.
Indeed, despite the dismal record of the State (i.e Central, state, local governments) in delivering minimally acceptable quality school education to India’s children even while government educrats do their darndest to dumb down standards in private education, there’s virtual unanimity within the academic, educators and political-bureaucratic communities that there’s no alternative to government delivery in primary schooling and tight government supervision and monitoring of secondary and higher education. Therefore instead of allowing the winds of liberalisation and deregulation — which since 1991 has freed and stimulated Indian industry — to blow through Indian academia (despite several landmark judgements of the judiciary in favour of loosening the grip of the government educracy on private education institutions), the education establishment seems hell-bent upon tightening the regime of controls on private education across the spectrum.
For instance, the historic Right to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 (aka RTE Act) which belatedly imposed a constitutional obligation on the State to provide free and compulsory education to all children six-14 years of age, also mandates stringent infras-tructure norms (or closure) on the country’s estimated 200,000 private ‘budget’ primaries to which poor but aspirational households despairing of abysmal quality government school education, are fleeing en masse — a provision which TeamLease chairman and educationist Manish Sabharwal (quoted earlier) has likened to an injunction to “stop eating bread, if you can’t have cake” (see EW March 2011 p.26).
Moreover powers proposed to be given to parents-dominated school management commi- ttees under the draft RTE Bill to rigorously monitor and penalise government school teachers for absenteeism and poor classroom learning outcomes, have been drastically diluted in the enacted legislation. Conterminously, despite several liberal judgements of the Supreme Court (T.M.A Pai Foundation Case (2002) and P.A. Inamdar vs. Union of India (2005)) empowering private unaided education institutions to determine their own admission processes and tuition fees subject to merit and fairness consi-derations, state governments across the country have been increasingly interfering with private sector education with the patent intent to level down private unaided school and college standards, rather than address the more demanding tasks of leveling up government institutions.
But despite official discouragement, the demand for globally-benchmarked quality education from the public — particularly contemporary India’s fast-expanding middle class — is so pressing that a new tribe of education entrepr-eneurs has surfaced within the economy and is bravely investing in K-12, vocational and higher education in the hope that the pressure of public opinion will drive liberalisation and deregulation of Indian education. Thus even while working within the licence-permit-quota regime of the Central and state govern-ments, companies such as Educomp Solutions, Everonn Education, NIIT, the Amity Group, Mexus, Helix Techno-logies, iDiscoveri among others, have rolled out nationally, transforming into stockmarket blue-chips and household names even as new genre capital-intensive ‘international’ schools affili-ated with offshore examination boards such as CIE, IBO and Edexcel have sprung up across the subcontinent.
Comments Karan Khemka, an alumnus of Georgetown (USA) and Cambridge (UK) universities and currently the Mumbai-based partner of the US-based Parthenon Group which bills itself as the world’s largest educa-tion consultancy firm with projects/clients in 60 countries including the Bill and Melinda Gates and Dell founda-tions: “Education entrepreneurs are finding ways to promote private schools, colleges and universities within the existing legal system. Private sector initiatives have created more than 1.1 million seats in higher education annually during the past three years. Even though the government refuses to make regulations less rigid, stakeholders seem to have found different ways and structures to promote schools and colleges. Critics say these structures might not be sustainable, or that there should be no place for profit in the education sector, but in the end, capacity was created where and when it was needed and a large cohort of youth has been provided access to high quality higher education.”
Certainly there’s no denying insistent demand for for-profit quality education. This is evidenced by the fact that denied admission into the handful of globally comparable Central universities and institutions of higher education such as the IITs, IIMs and NITs, middle class India is exporting over 100,000 students annually to foreign universities in the US, Britain and other countries, paying out an estimated $5.9 billion (Rs.27,000 crore) per year for superior higher education. Despite this, if the government establishment and the Indian intelligentsia refuse to accept a larger role for private and non-state initiatives in Indian education, it’s perhaps because they are unaware that countries and governments worldwide are experimenting with non-government and private initiatives in public education.
For example, since the Independent Schools Reform Act, 1992 was passed in Sweden — perhaps the most die-hard socialist country in the world throughout the 20th century — parents now have the choice to send their children to independent non-government primary and secondary schools run by NGOs or private educators without having to pay any fees. Under a nationwide voucher system, local governments are obliged to pay independent school promoters the same fee amounts they pay to government schools on a per pupil basis. Since then the country’s independent schools movement has grown with the membership of the Swedish Association of Independent Schools having risen to 830 schools which educate 10 percent of children in K-12 education countrywide.
Likewise in the US, the charter schools movement based on the same principles has grown exponentially with NGOs and committed educationists running primary-secondaries under ‘charter’ to deliver better, measureable learning outcomes. With their number increasing by almost 10 percent per year, currently over 5,400 charter schools with an aggregate enrolment of over 1.7 million students are operational in the US. Similarly in the UK the 11-month old Tory-LibDem government is planning to go a step further by permitting even groups of parents to promote independent schools funded by government.
Even if the country’s learning-proof political class, which has a vested interest in the status quo, is unwilling to acknowledge the new currents of reform sweeping through the ivory towers of academia and K-12 education around the world, it’s high time Indian academia and the intellig-entsia spoke up for a better deal for the world’s largest population of children and youth. For over six decades, year after year, successive finance ministers — most of whom aren’t even remembered in the footnotes of history — have splurged tax revenue on the pay and perks of bureaucrats, defence, unmerited subsidies, recapitalisation of public sector banks and shoring up non-performing public sector enterprises. In the process there’s little left for educating the world’s largest population of socio-economically challenged children and youth, a shameful cons-piracy in which the country’s myopic middle class and intelligentsia are complicit. With a mere 4.5 percent of the proposed aggregate expenditure of Rs.1257,729 crore in fiscal 2011-12 allocated for education of the nation’s voiceless children in his status quo Union Budget 2011-12, the finance minister has set a bad example for state governments to follow.
Basking in the sunshine of the favour of the finance minister, the leaders of India Inc, the prospering middle class and intelligentsia with access to private education sup at the high table, even as over 150 million children are grievously short-changed and left to cope with a government K-12 system plagued by ramshackle infrastructure, obsolete curriculums, chronic teacher absent-eeism and the linguistic chauvinism of state governments.
In the bleak Dickensian world of public education, like Oliver Twist, abandoned children in the government school system want — and deserve — more. But as in the preceding 63 Union budgets presented to Parliament since independence, Budget 2011-12 once again denies the world’s largest child population an equitable share of national resources.