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.
Conclusion:While money may not ensure quality education, lack of adequate resources will only deepen the social divide between the people.