Financing of education has dominated the development discourse for long now. Clearly so, for despite the recommendation by the Kothari Commission in 1966 to raise public expenditure on education to 6% of GNP by 1986, we are nowhere close to it. And given the close link between economic growth and the educational level, it is undoubtedly an imperative question for a country that accounts for about one-third of the total number of illiterates in the world.
To put the picture in perspective ? the authors point out at the marginally high share of public expenditure on education in both the ?so-called market economies of West Europe and North America as well as the communist systems of Cuba and pre-reform China?. In the former group, public expenditure accounts for 35-40% of the GDP, which goes up to 50% in countries like the Netherlands. Public expenditure on education in India, on the other hand, declined from a level of 4.9% of GDP in 1991 to 3.9% by 2000-2001. Even low-income countries such as Kenya and Zimbabwe are spending more than the Asian countries such as India and Pakistan.
Interestingly, despite the emergence of several centrally-sponsored schemes such as Operation Blackboard, Non-Formal Education, Mahila Samakhya etc, there has been no remarkable shift in the financial allocation to the sector. So, while limited public expenditure is a challenge facing the nation, overcoming the institutional bottlenecks restricting public expenditure to education is another.
These are precisely the questions that the book attempts to answer ? beginning from the adequacy of the magnitude of public expenditure on elementary education to the composition of such expenditure. The book does add to the present universe of literature on the subject in terms of analysis of the States? expenditure. It moves a step ahead of the central government?s budgetary provisions for education, pointing out the states still spend about 85% of the total public expenditure on education. The authors observe that the shift of education from the State List to the Concurrent List through the 42nd amendment of the Constitution in 1976 was a major landmark.
Even as the states continued to spend a large chunk on education, the influence of the central government in terms of policy making grew continuously. ?Among the well-known problems associated with centrally-sponsored schemes, particularly externally-aided programmes, are unevenness in their regional spread, thus contributing to the deepening of the divide between educationally developed and backward states and the issue of long-drawn delays in release of the funds from the central government and a variety of problems in their utilisation at the level of states.?
The book also deals in detail with the issue of fiscal crisis of the states in the post-reforms era that inevitably led to the constraining of social sector spending.
Tracking the budget expenditures in Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan across four states in India, the authors have interesting micro observations. While there has been considerable progress in the overall literacy rate post independence, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar and Rajasthan are still below the all-India average. The authors indicate ?in Bihar, all the districts show an increase in the number of female illiterates between 1991 and 2001. In districts such as Purnea, Katihar, Kishanganj, Madhepura, Saharsa, Supaul etc, the number of illiterates increased by more than 20% during the decade.?
In the light of these and more such problems, the authors call for a ?comprehensive review of the Centre-State fiscal relations?.