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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Only six per cent of elementary education budget spent on children, points out survey by Aarti Dhar

Interventions aimed directly at children — providing free textbooks, uniforms and addressing out of school children – account only for 6 per cent of the total investment in elementary education. The largest investment — 78 per cent — of the education budget in India is invested in teachers and management costs while the next largest spending, to the tune of 14 per cent, is done on creating school infrastructure. Only 1 per cent is spent on improving the quality of education.

This has been shown by PAISA — a non-government group — in its analysis of elementary education funds of seven States for 2009-2010. The study covered the districts of Medak (Andhra Pradesh), Nalanda and Purnea (Bihar), Kangra (Himachal Pradesh), Sagar (Madhya Pradesh), Satara (Maharashtra), Jaipur and Udaipur (Rajasthan) and Jalpaiguri (West Bengal).

The focus of the study was to track the flow of funds from their point of origin to their final point of expenditure: the district or the school. This required analysis at the levels of the Centre and the State, district and school.

The survey says that substantial finances were provided to expand the elementary schooling system. Between 2007-08 and 2009-10, the elementary education budget increased from Rs. 68,710 crore to Rs. 97,255 crore. To put this investment in perspective, in 2008-09, the government invested Rs. 6,314 a child. However, the per child investment in each of these States for 2009-10 ranged from Rs. 3,982 in West Bengal to Rs. 19,111 in Himachal Pradesh indicating a vast inter-State disparity in investments.

Inter-State patterns of investment reveal interesting variations. Bihar stands out for investing just over half its budget (59 per cent) on teachers, followed by Madhya Pradesh and West Bengal, which invested 64 per cent and 67 per cent respectively. One reason for this low investment is a policy in all three States to substitute regular teachers for contract teachers. Bihar and West Bengal invest the largest proportion of their resources in programmes directed at children.

While funds for infrastructure development are often channelled to schools; the key decisions related to sanctions and procurement are taken by the district administration. Importantly, while a school can demand infrastructure funds, it has no decision-making power as most major infrastructure-related expenditures are incurred based on directives received from the district and State administration.

An analysis of the flow of funds from the Centre to the district or schools revealed that there was need for a serious reassessment of the current model of financing and decision-making in elementary education to enable India to make the shift from schooling to learning.

Increased centralisation

With the implementation of the Right to Education Act, funds to elementary education have seen a significant increase. However, this increase was accompanied by an increased centralisation of decision-making — the antithesis of a decentralised approach. “This centralisation is further exacerbated by the governance deficit in actual expenditure management,” a provisional report of PAISA District Studies (rural), 2011 said.

The survey was jointly done by Accountability Initiative and Centre for Policy Research.

The survey points to serious delays and gaps in fund flows across all levels of government. “These delays have a knock-on effect on expenditures, resulting in the prioritisation of recurring expenditures like salaries, at the expense of other key learning-related activities like training and quality. These problems are compounded by the fact that little time and fact was spent in developing the capacities of school and local officials to exercise discretion whereever necessary.

It advocates for greater transparency and efficient fund flow management, which was critical to ensure that the recommended move away from the current system of tied time-lined budgets to a system that focuses on children and school, works.