Rhetoric And Realities In Indian Education

Assessing The Claims Of The NDA Government

 Siba Sankar Mohanty

TO the surprise of all concerned, the NDA government has started a massive propaganda blitz, claiming that ‘India is shining’; that things have never been so good for India before and that the country is poised to become a super power by 2020. An advertisement published by the ministry of human resource development in all national dailies has made tall claims regarding the ‘achievements’ of the government in the sphere of education. It claims that:

• Three crore out-of-school children were back in schools since 1998, under the Sarva Siksha Abhiyan (SSA) launched by the government with expenditure incurred to the tune of Rs 16,000 crore.

• Appointments of 10 lakh new teachers and instructors were sanctioned for the spread of education.

• A phenomenal increase in the number of technical institutions (116 per cent), number of seats (165 per cent) and intake of students in IITs (66 per cent) during the tenure of the NDA government.

Not surprisingly, there neither is there any way to cross check these claims made by the government from any official source nor is any data provided on the expenditure incurred by the government on different heads. However, a closer look at the facts and figures available lays bare the perfidy of the government.

FLAWED CLAIMS

According to official estimates, the proportion of out-of-school children in 1999-2000 was around 24 per cent of the total population in 6-14 age group, which amounts to a figure between 4.7 to 5 crore according to the population estimates of the Technical Group on Population Projection (Planning Commission). The HRD ministry is claiming that 3 crore out of the nearly 5 crore out-of-school children have been brought back to school after spending Rs 16,000 crore under the SSA. However, the Tapas Majumdar Committee appointed by the union government had estimated the total financial commitment required to bring all Indian children in the 6-14 age group under the purview of school education to be Rs 1,36,922 crore over a ten year period (1998-99 to 2007-08), which comes to an approximate 0.72 per cent of the estimated GDP during this period. The year-wise estimates are given in Table 1.

Table 1

Financial Commitment Needed for

Universalisation of Elementary Education during 1998-99 to 2007-08

        Source: India Education Report, A Profile of Basic Education, NIEPA

The government is claiming that it has achieved over 60 per cent of the target in universalising elementary education by spending only 0.11 per cent of the expenditure estimated by the Tapas Majumdar Committee. This is nothing but a gigantic fraud being played by the government to conceal its sheer lack of commitment towards universalising elementary education.

According to the Selected Education Statistics published by the MHRD, there were around 18.7 lakh teachers in the primary and junior basic schools in 1998. The government claims to have appointed 4 lakh new teachers and 6 lakh new instructors over the past five years, i.e. a 55 per cent increase in the number of teachers. Even if we take the average salary of the new as well as the old teachers existing in 1998, i.e a total number of 28.7 lakh teachers, to be a meagre Rs 1500/- per month (the salary of a para-teacher), their annual salary bill would have totalled Rs  5166 crore. The government has claimed that the appointment of all the primary and junior basic school teachers have been covered under the expenditure of Rs 16,000 crore spent on the Sarva Siksha Abhiyan (SSA). This implies that either the entire sum of money spent on the SSA went to meet the salary bill of the teachers (that too for a little more than three years) or that the addition of 10 lakh new teachers over the past five years is another lie being peddled by the government.

In its Interim Budget of 2004 the government has claimed that between 2001 to February 2004 it has approved the opening of 93,028 new schools, the construction of 50,992 new school buildings and 1,09,399 additional class rooms with 1,06,920 toilets and 67,803 drinking water sources. The Selected Educational Statistics published by the MHRD suggests that the number of existing schools till 2000 was 8,45,007. The government’s claim amounts to suggesting a highly commendable increase in the number of schools in the country by 11 per cent in the last three years. However, while answering to a question asked by Member of Parliament M M Agarwal in the Rajya Sabha on May 2, 2003, the minister concerned stated that on an average the government has spent Rs 40.25 lakh for building each school under the SSA. Even if we assume that the entire amount of Rs 16,000 crore has been spent only on constructing new school buildings, then the government could have built only around 39,750 new school buildings and not 50,992 as claimed in the Interim Budget.

ALLOCATION FOR THE SSA

So far we have exposed the hollowness of the claims made by the government while assuming that the government has actually spent Rs 16,000 crore on the SSA. But has the government actually spent that amount? The total allocation for the SSA has been to the tune of Rs 3078.11 crore up to February 21, 2003 according to the MHRD Annual Report of 2002-03. If the central allocation of Rs 2732.32 crore for 2003-04 under the SSA is added to the earlier amount, the total figure stands at Rs 5810.43 crore. This is only around one third of the claimed Rs 16,000 crore spent on the SSA. Whom is the government trying to fool? Does the government mean to say that it has spent the balance amount without accounting for it in the budget documents? Otherwise, why is there no information about it in any of the government documents? Any responsible government would have provided sufficiently disaggregated information on how and on which heads has it spent public resources.

CAPITAL ALLOCATION TO EDUCATION

The capital allocation on education, which is meant for the creation of new buildings and other infrastructure, has been very low throughout the tenure of the NDA regime. It declined from around Rs 224.53 crore in 1994-95 to Rs 18.42 crore in 2002-03. On the other hand the government claims to have upgraded 17 Regional Engineering Colleges as National Institutes of Technology, established 650 additional Engineering and Technology institutions, have created additional infrastructure in them so that more than 2.2 lakh additional seats have been created in IITs and Engineering colleges and 5 more IITs are in the making. Over the last five years, the central government has incurred an expenditure of only around Rs 134 crore towards asset creation in Education, Sports and Culture taken together. With such a skimpy amount it would not have been possible to even acquire enough land for the new assets as claimed by the government.

Table 2

 Budgetary Allocation To Education

(in Rs Crore)

               Source: Annual Financial Statements, Union Budget for relevant years

TECHNICAL AND HIGHER EDUCATION

The approach of the government towards higher education has been completely negative. The budgetary allocation for higher education has declined in absolute terms during the tenure of the NDA government. While the number of students going for higher education in our country has been increasing in absolute numbers, the withdrawal of state support to higher education is completely unjustifiable.

Figure 1

                       Source:  Budget Documents, Demand for Grants, MHRD

Moreover, if the Model Act introduced by the UGC last year is implemented, it would have serious implications for the future of higher education in our country. The Model Act would pave the way for drastic withdrawal of state funding as well as privatisation of the university education.

In the field of technical education, the NDA government has only facilitated the unbridled mushrooming of private institutions, without any attempt to regulate their astronomical fees and reckless profiteering. The government has claimed an increase in the number of technical institutions by 116 per cent, number of seats by 165 per cent, and intake of students in IITs by 66 per cent. There has indeed been an increase in the number of engineering degree colleges from 732 in 1998-99 to 1234 in 2003-04. But out of those 502 new colleges, 488 colleges have been established in the private sector only.

Table 3

Growth of Degree Engineering Colleges over the last five years

Source: AICTE List of Degree Engineering Colleges available at < www.aicte.ernet.in >

While the number of government colleges increased from 161 in 1998 to 175 in 2003-04, the number of private colleges almost doubled from 571 to 1059 during the same period. Such a disproportionate expansion of private engineering colleges was a direct fallout of the policy of commercialisation of education pursued by the government which was greatly aided by the Supreme Court verdict allowing private institutions to charge arbitrary fees without the fear of government interference. The fees of those private engineering colleges are so high that it discourages the students coming from poor backgrounds to opt for engineering education.

Table 4

Fee Structure for Engineering Education in Selected States

  *Before Supreme Court Verdict

  Source: Student Struggle, July 2003.

In a country like India where the bottom 40 per cent of the population share only 18.2 per cent of the total national income (World Development Report 1999), how many students can afford such expensive higher education?