The Indian government has announced a new education policy in the country after nearly 34 years and has also promised to spend six percent of the country’s GDP on it. There is no denying that government schemes and claims are always attractive. Government has been anyone, there is always a talk of Antyodaya i.e. the last person of the society in all the schemes, but to date, there is hardly any such scheme which has actually done any benefits to Antyodaya.
However, in its first term, the Modi government had also announced plans to build international-level universities in the country. Under this scheme, one thousand crore rupees were announced to Jio and Manipal University. But what has happened to these two universities is not yet known.
Let’s talk about six percent of the GDP declared will be spent on education. The share of the Union budget allocated for education was 4.14 percent in 2014-15, which fell to 3.4 percent in 2019-20 and you can get this information from the budget documents from 2014 to 2020. Also, in terms of school education, the budget is reduced compared to others. Based on the revised estimates of the budget, the total amount allocated to schooling has come down from Rs 38,600 crore in 2014-15 to Rs 37,100 crore in 2018-19.
In fact, what is repeatedly said by the government to spend 20 percent of the country’s government budget on education can only be possible when the states along with the central government increase their spending. Currently, the major share of education spending (between 75-80 percent) comes from the states, but in the last few years, it is also being cut or reduced by the states, which also shows the opposite effect rapidly.
During the last decade, spending on education has been less than 3 percent of the country’s GDP, while the proposed global standard is 6 percent. And now the Modi government has declared that it too will spend on education according to this standard. It is not a wonder that is being declared by this government.
In fact, the most important suggestion of the Kothari Commission set up in 1964 to determine education policy was that 6 percent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) should be spent on education. It was also made a national goal in the first National Education Policy (1968). But today this national goal has not been achieved even after 40 years.
But when the Modi government presented the budget for the first time in 2014-15, the education sector was given a budget of Rs 83000 crore. Later that year it was reduced to 69000 crores. After this, the education budget did not increase at the rate it should have increased.
During the second term of the Modi government, when Nirmala Sitharaman presented the budget in July 2019, the education sector got a budget of Rs 94,854 crore, which is just 15.68 percent more than the 2014 budget. While the total budget increased by more than 55 percent during this period.
In 2014-15, the total budget amounted to Rs 17.95 lakh crore, which increased to 27.86 lakh crore in 2019-20. In our country, not only the budget is very short in the field of education, but its distribution is also very uneven. Of the 94,854 crores released in the education sector, according to the budget of 2019-20, the budget of school education is Rs 56,53 .63 crores and the budget of higher education is 38,317.36 crores.
Out of the Rs 38,317.36 crore of higher education, the share of about 1000 universities in the country is Rs 6843 crore. At the same time, less than 50 numbers, of IITs and IIMs located in the country is more than the budget of universities. The budget of 23 IIT colleges across the country is Rs 6410 crore, while 20 IIM colleges in the country get Rs 445 crore.
This is the reason why the university education of our country is in a very delicate state. Apart from the uneven distribution of the budget, another problem is that the amount of budget that is proposed in the field of education is not spent. According to a report by the Center for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE), there were eight occasions in the last 10 years when the proposed budget for education could not be spent. According to this report, from 2014 to 2019, the proposed budget could not be spent in the education sector. In such a situation, the question arises that the announcement made by the government is going to be a mere announcement or some change will also happen!
