Union Budget 2019-20 – Low priority for human capital development

A striking feature of pro tem finance minister Piyush Goyal’s 100-minute budget address to Parliament and the nation on February 1 was that the word ‘education’ was mentioned only once and the allocation for education at Rs.93,807 crore was marginally higher than last year – Dilip Thakore A major infirmity of the Indian State is that its institutions don’t listen to each other. On January 15, the globally respected Delhi/Mumbai-based Pratham Education Foundation (estb.1994), which raises millions of dollars abroad annually to fund its remedial primary education programmes, formally released its Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2018. The report — the outcome of the combined effort of 30,000 field personnel, mainly college/university students and NGO volunteers who tested the academic learning outcomes of class I-VIII children of 300,000 households in 596 districts of rural India (the total number of administrative districts countrywide — urban plus rural — is 701), says that 27 percent of children in class VIII cannot read/comprehend class II textbooks, and a mere 44 percent can manage simple three-digits by one-digit division sums. The previous ASER 2017, which in a departure from standard practice assessed the learning outcomes of adolescents aged 14-18 years schooled in rural India, reported that 60 percent couldn’t correctly calculate the price of a shirt sold at a 10 percent discount and/or read the time on an analogue clock. These annual learning surveys of the Pratham Foundation provide telling insights into the capabilities and productivity of the country’s rural citizens who constitute the majority (68 percent) of 21st century India’s 1.3 billion people. A fortnight later on February 1, Piyush Goyal, Union minister of railways and coal in the BJP-led NDA government, presented the Union Budget 2019-20, the last budget of the incumbent government before General Election 2019 scheduled for this summer. Goyal was standing in for Union finance minister Arun Jaitley who had flown abroad for medical treatment. Technically, it should have been an interim vote-on-account budget for funding government expenditure for the next three months before the general election. But to advertise the BJP/NDA government’s professedly excellent management of the Indian economy during the past five years and to spell out the ruling party’s utopian vision for the future, Goyal presented a full-fledged Union budget to Parliament and the nation. However a striking feature of the minister’s 100-minute budget address was that the word ‘education’ was mentioned only once, the allocation for education was static (adjusted for inflation) at Rs.93,807 crore and conveyed the impression that the Rt. Hon minister had never heard of ASER 2018 or its predecessor reports which are often released with great fanfare by Union ministers. The detailed ASER surveys — which routinely report that learning outcomes in the country’s 1.20 million government primaries are significantly worse than in private budget rural schools — aside, finance ministry bureaucrats who shaped Union Budget 2019-20 seem equally oblivious of the World Bank’s Human Capital Index and UNDP’s annual Human Development Report which rank India among the contemporary world’s negligent…