Comment

You guessed it. My alternative budget for this year has been inspired by the iconoclastic movie that revealed how hollow our education system is.

Of course, you don’t need to be a philosopher to understand the value and power of education to make or mar the future of India.
And the way things are going at the moment, only the naive will believe that India is on the cusp of an era where it will reap the much-touted ‘demographic dividend’.

So who are the ‘Three Idiots’ who will play the key roles in this transformational exercise? The stakeholders, of course.

The first set of ‘idiots’ would be the students (and their parents) who can actually help India reap the demographic dividend in the next two decades.

The second set would be the teachers and administrators, whose job is to ensure that Indian children and youth get the kind of education and skills that will make them human resource assets in the 21st century.

The third set would be the regulators whose job is to ensure that schools, colleges and universities - both in the public and the private sector - deliver the kind of education and skills that India needs in the future.

The redoubtable finance minister Pranab Mukherjee can partner with his illustrious colleague Kapil Sibal and implement a set of bold policy initiatives that will simultaneously target all the three.
Piecemeal efforts targeted at one set of ‘idiots’ have been tried in the past, but clearly, they have failed.

That is why the school dropout ratio remains so alarmingly high despite schemes like Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan and midday meals.
The basic problem is, the latter two sets of ‘idiots’ simply haven’t been doing their jobs, leading to untold misery for the first set.
Quite simply, in most cases in India, the teachers don’t teach and the regulators don’t regulate. As per reports, there is an estimated shortage of around 25 lakh teachers.

Worse, the state has been perpetually reluctant and suicidal in withdrawing from its most fundamental duty - of imparting primary education.

So the Budget for Three Idiots should start with the basics and keep it simple.

Though accurate data will be available after the actual Budget is presented on February 26, the government will spend approximately Rs 25,000 crore on Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan and the midday meal scheme.

In consultation with Sibal, the finance minister must quadruple the allocation to Rs 100,000 crores. Think that is too much? Think again.

The National University of Educational Planning & Administration conducted a survey of 1.1 million primary and upper primary schools across 604 districts of India in 2007.

It found that close to 100,000 such schools did not have a single functional classroom.

About 14% of such schools in urban areas and 9% in rural areas did not have any classroom.

Another 100,000 schools were in desperate need of urgent repairs and were literally crumbling apart.

How do you expect children to come to schools and get even a semblance of education without classrooms - forget about libraries, laboratories and toilets?

And where would the midday meals be cooked and where would the children eat those meals?

As such, our budgetary allocation on education, as a percentage of GDP, is a meagre 3%, whereas for a nation like Cuba, it is around 18%; clearly indicating the priority they attach to education as a whole.

The finance minister can tweak the crucial NREGA and make it mandatory for the funds to be utilised for productive assets like durable buildings and classrooms for the more than 1 million primary schools in India.

Not only will at least one member of a poor family get 100 days of employment; but children of such families can then hope to go to functional schools with physical infrastructure.

This is not a complicated policy initiative; but it will be game-changing.

Functional schools with physical infrastructure will ensure that future generations of children will have access to schools, while their parents have earned a livelihood constructing those same schools.

In effect, the actual allocation for Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan and midday meal schemes will not be Rs 100,000 crores, as a large part of NREGA funds will be utilised for this.

More importantly, since parents will understand that the very future of their children lies in those modest buildings, they will gladly take all help they can from activists to ensure that corrupt contractors do not cheat their children.

It will be a classically win-win policy, even with the notorious corruption that is associated with the implementation of such schemes.

The same model can be subsequently implemented for secondary schools, too, where the problem is even more acute (as per World Bank, gross enrollment ratio in secondary education is lower than world average, even less then east Asia and Latin America) with the same transformational results - a classic mix of NREGA with Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan.

Now that the first set of ‘idiots’ have a school to go to, the challenge is to make teachers and principals actually work in those schools.