Can India's education budget fund increased spending in new policy?

Good public education is a fundamental right in India, and there is a strong correlation between public investment in education, child development and empowerment.

The government’s Draft New Education Policy released May 2019 suggests increasing spending on education from 10% of total government expenditure to 20% by 2030. However, there is no funding available for such an increase in India’s current education budget.

Further, since 2015, government spending on school education has actually decreased after correcting for inflation, according to an analysis of state and central education finances over the years.

Good public education is a fundamental right in India, and there is a strong correlation between public investment in education, child development and empowerment. For instance, states that spent more on education, such as Himachal Pradesh and Kerala, scored higher on the empowerment index, which takes into account attendance levels at primary, upper primary, secondary and senior secondary levels, as well as indicators linked with gender equality such as sex ratio at birth and early marriage.

*Year: Average expenditure on school education for the period 2012-13 to 2018-19

**Note: This is computed by the Centre for Budget and Policy Studies taking six indicators (four relating to education and 2 relating to empowerment, sourced from National Sample Survey Office’s 71st round and National Family Health Survey, 2015-16, respectively)

Central government’s education budget reduced since 2014

Even as the government promises an increase in spending on education, the share of the union budget allocated to education fell from 4.14% in 2014-15 to 3.4% in 2019-20, the period during which the Bharatiya Janata Party headed the central government, according to budget documents from 2014 to 2020. In the 2019-20 budget, the share of the union budget allocated to education remains at 3.4%, which means that, this financial year, the government is not allocating more money to education as the new education policy would require.

It is not only the share that has declined; in case of school education, the budget has decreased in absolute terms. Total money allocated to school education reduced from Rs 38,600 crore in 2014-15 to Rs 37,100 crore in 2018-19, based on the budget’s revised estimates.

Business Standard