11/03/2020 - Education | Mainstorming

IAS Parliament 5 years

KEY POINTS

· The lack of power in schools is taken note of by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Human Resource Development in its latest report on budgetary grants for school education and literacy for 2020-21.

· Under the framework of concurrent powers, the Centre operates its own schemes and sponsors several school education programmes covering the States, notably Samagra Shiksha and the Mid Day Meal scheme.

· Yet, as the panel found from data for 2017-18, only 56.45% of government schools had electricity and 56.98% a playground, while almost 40% lacked a boundary wall.

· Other depressing insights from the district information database as of end-2019, are: neglect of toilet construction for children with special needs, failure to build toilets for girls in a third of secondary schools and laboratories for higher secondary science students.

· The tardy progress on such important facilities, in spite of the projects having been sanctioned, shows the low priority that school education is being accorded.

· One of the first things the government did at the launch of its second term was a ‘100-day programme’ for education, focused in part on training of schoolteachers and opening of central schools.

· More fundamentally, the Centre and States must realise that their talk of a demographic dividend has little meaning, when they do not provide enough funding for proposals on the one hand and the administrative machinery fails to utilise even the amount allocated in some cases.

· As the parliamentary committee notes, the allocation to the School Education and Literacy department has suffered a cut of 27.52%, amounting to Rs 22,725 crore in the Budget Estimate for 2020-21, although public expenditure on education has been rising.

· The government-run school sector needs a fund infusion. A public school system that guarantees universal access, good learning and all facilities has to be among the highest national priorities.