The Budget’s Abdication

Context: Budget’s decreased allocations for education, reluctance to recognize pandemic fallout and focus on exemplar schools, will sharpen the educational divide.

Associated concerns:

• Less allocation: Education was allocated Rs 6,000 crore less on education as compared to last year.
• Differential educational provisioning: It sets up 15,000 exemplar schools but makes just a few seats available to the dispossessed in supposedly good private schools.
• Issues with focusing on community volunteers: to reach out to children; National Education Policy, 2020 (NEP) proposes “peer-tutoring and trained volunteers” to increase foundational literacy.
  • Concerns:
    • De-legitimizes the teaching profession-associated qualifications and the training mandated by the state for people to become teachers.
    • Often compromises salaries and working conditions of the local community.
    • Leads to exploitation and impacts the quality of education for the poor.
• Issues with public schools: Poor learning outcomes of children and large-scale absenteeism of teachers mainly due to lack of accountability. (has diverted the focus towards private sector participation)
• Muted impact of private partnership: in the past, private schools catered to relative better-off, but now the poor are being targeted for profit.
  • NEP 2020 states that non-governmental philanthropic organizations will be supported to build schools by making Right to Education Act, less restrictive.
  • Allowing private participation is based on the need to shift from inputs to the outputs, indicating that schools can do better with lesser financial inputs.

Need for more budgetary resources:

• To fulfil the aims of NEP 2020: which reiterates the state’s commitment to strengthening the Public Education System (PES).
• To fulfil the obligation under the Right to Education Act and education as a fundamental right.
• To help drop-out children returning to school and maintaining infrastructure (online learning), dietary needs and ensuring a stable, secure, stress-free environment to grow up in.