Why metrics to measure education spending need to be redefined
India’s historic spending on education over the last 10 years has hovered around 3% of GDP. While calls for increasing the spending on education increase each year, the government has an unspent balance of 7000 crores from the previous budget.
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The government’s own education policy calls for 6% of GDP to be spent on education even as we struggle to spend the existing allocations. Therefore, I contest whether GDP spent on education gives an accurate picture of India’s true education budget.
Pictures and videos from across the country of thousands vying for few open job slots have flooded social media over the past few weeks. These images reveal a grim state of unemployability amongst the Indian youth. Despite successive budgets increasing allocation of money towards education, we are barely moving towards a knowledge economy. The education budget is broadly divided into higher education and school education.
The government has strongly prioritized improving school education at scale with about 70% of the total allocation from last fiscal year going towards public schools including the Prime Minister's flagship PM SHRI Schools scheme to build over 14,000 model schools implementing the New Education Policy. Despite being a central government led flagship scheme, the spending for PM SHRI at 2800 crores was less than the budgeted total of 4000 crores. The government’s education machinery needs to continuously strive towards meeting the spending
