(Union Budget 2016-17) Children Neglected by Fudged Budget

Despite the steady devaluation of post-independence India’s human capital, the BJP/NDA government’s second full-fledged budget shows no awareness that agricultural productivity and rural regeneration are intimately connected with improved learning outcomes in education Ever since EducationWorld was launched on the eve of the new millennium with the mission to “build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda,” your editors have been disappointed with every Union budget presented to Parliament and the people. For some inexplicable reason, developing the country’s high-potential human resource has been — and continues to be — a low priority of the Central and state governments for the past 68 years since independence. And regrettably, academia and the intelligentsia (including the media), which should know better, have been complicit in the neglect of early childhood, primary, secondary and higher education with the country and society paying dearly for continuous under-investment in development of India’s abundant human capital. Prolonged under-investment and societal failure to provide meaningful, qualitative education to two generations of post-independence India’s children has burdened the country with 300 million adult illiterates, a community equal to the entire population of the United States of America. The rest of the populace, except for a tiny sliver at the top of the pyramid, is at best semi or functionally literate. For a start, 53 percent of the 200 million children enrolled in the country’s 1.2 million state government schools at the start of every academic year, drop out of the education system prior to completing elementary education (class VIII). Moreover, the learning outcomes of children in government primaries, as conscientiously reported by the highly-respected NGO Pratham in its Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), are rock bottom. Consequently, even the 30 million children who complete secondary education annually, have weak foundations and are ill-prepared for higher study. Unsurprisingly, learning attainments in the great majority of India’s 35,000 colleges and 800 universities, which host 27 million students, are poor. Only two of the country’s universities are ranked among the Top 200 in the World University Rankings league tables of the authoritative London-based rating agencies QS and Times Higher Education, and several studies (McKinsey World Institute, Aspiring Minds) indicate that the overwhelming majority of graduates of India’s higher education institutions are not fit for employment in multinational companies. The accumulated burden of inferior quality education and poor learning outcomes across the spectrum is that industrial shopfloor and farm productivity in India compares unfavourably with developed OECD, China and most newly-industrialised countries of South-east Asia. Despite this dismal scenario and steady devaluation of the country’s human capital, the proclaimed agriculture and rural development-oriented Union Budget 2016-17, presented to Parliament and the nation on February 29 by Union finance minister Arun Jaitley, shows no official awareness that agriculture productivity and rural regeneration are intimately connected with improved education in rural primaries. In his 101-minute budget speech, Jaitley ritually included “education, skills and job creation to make India a knowledge-based and productive society” among his…