The movement of Students along with other Universities and Institutes of Excellence in the country do raise questions on the importance of Public Education. Education in India has always received a low priority with only about 3% of the National Budget spent on Education. Even within this, there is a lot of inequity with IITs, IIMs receiving the larger share among educational Institutions and Central Universities receiving more share in relation to State Universities. Overall, however the spending on education by the State has been low.

Despite the miniscule investment on Education by the State, the Public Education has played an important role in creating opportunities for Social Mobility. Those belonging to the poor, marginalised and vulnerable sections of Society through benefiting from subsidised education have witnessed inter-generational mobility. Many of them have risen to become Civil Servants, Officials, Social Work professionals, Media personal and Academics.

The changing priorities of the State which tends to move towards privatisation and commercialisation of education has attempted at increasing fee driven by the logic of reducing subsidies towards the same. While the fee raise has been successful with many of the IITs and Universities in the recent past, it has received resistance at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). Many IITs and Universities too have started mobilizing students and providing resistance.

With the arrival of BJP at the Centre, JNU has been subject to a defamation drive. The fake news and media affiliated to saffron wing, while on the one hand intends defame the University in the name of propagating that it is the ground for anti-national activities, on the other hand it also tries to argue of  the irrelevance of higher education. Pursuing of higher education is depicted as a wastage of public and tax payer’s money.

A modern society intending to create social and economic equity cannot do away with public education. While education plays an important role in creating social mobility and gaining access to employment, vocations and occupations – its role is much beyond that. Education creates an enlightened citizenry. The more the opportunities available for those from poor & marginalized sections, those in remote areas, women, Dalits, Adivasis to gain access to higher education – the better the movement it creates towards social progress.

Along with a commercial agenda, the communal agenda of the present regime also adds to its present drive. University is seen as a place where ideas and ideologies are discussed, debated, critiqued, intellectualised, written, argued and spoken. University provides spaces where not one but several ideologies may find a fertile ground. There could be Liberals, Marxists, Ambedkarites, Gandhians, Feminists, Environmentalists, Right leaning, Left learning or Centrists. Prevalence of followers of multiple ideological viewpoints can only strengthen the intellectual environment in a University. This needs to be enriched and celebrated.

However, a regime which is intolerant of other ideological viewpoints and sees other than itself as anti-nationals, University and in particular higher education is seen as spaces which corrupts. It is seen as places which creates anti-nationals who do not turn into Saffron Bhakts but become critics of the same. The strongest critics of the current regime in the recent past from the younger generation are the ones who have come from the most marginal sections of society. The current regime looks at this as a threat to its agenda of Hindu Rashtra. The lesser they get exposed to universal values and ideas, the lesser the blocks towards creating a theocratic state.

Due to its proximity with Ambanis, the current regime also intends to promote private universities such as Jio Institute, which has received the tag of Institute of excellence even before its start.

The misadventures by the current regime due to both commercial and communal agenda is leading to the current student unrest.

Public Education cannot be done away with without giving up on the need for Social Progress and Social Equity.

Author: T Navin is a Researcher and works with an NGO

Courtesy:countercurrents.org

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New Delhi: “One has to be alive to be a patriot,” former Indian health secretary K Sujatha Rao wrote on Twitter on May 13, 2019, referring to election debates that focussed on issues of “nationalism and terror and not health”.

The data back Rao’s assertion of misplaced priorities.

In 2017, terrorism claimed the lives of 766 Indians, or 0.007% of all deaths, while health reasons claimed 6.6 million Indians, or 90% of all deaths.

In 2017, the last year for which comparable data are available, India’s spending on defence was double its health expenditure, according to the 2017-18 budget.

Poor investment in health and education directly impacts the country’s productivity and economic growth. Indians work for six-and-a-half years at peak productivity, compared to 20 years in China, 16 in Brazil and 13 in Sri Lanka, ranking 158th out of 195 countries in an international ranking of human capital, as IndiaSpend reported in September 2018.

8,000 times more deaths from ill-health than terror
There were 9.9 million deaths in India in 2017, with a death rate of 717.79 deaths per 100,000 people, according to the 2018 Global Burden of Disease (GBD), a global estimate of morbidity and mortality published by the University of Washington.

Communicable, maternal, neonatal and nutritious diseases caused 26.6% of all deaths in India, and non-communicable diseases caused 63.4% of all deaths, while injuries accounted for 9.8%.

Deaths by conflict and terrorism fall under the “interpersonal violence” category, accounting for 0.007% of all deaths, or 766, according to GBD data.

Terrorism claimed fewer lives, according to another database: there were 178 terror incidents reported nationwide in 2017, killing 77 and injuring 295, according to the South Asia Terrorism Portal.

Deaths due to diabetes (254,500), suicides (210,800), infectious diseases (2 million) and non-communicable diseases (6.2 million) put together are 8,000 times the deaths caused by terrorism (766).

Defence vs health vs education spending
“… Hlth [Health] & edu [education] need to be top (sic) & [at] least 8% GDP allocated 2 [to] them,” Rao wrote in her tweet.

India’s public health spending is among the world’s lowest. With a fifth of the world’s population, India’s public expenditure was 1.02% of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2015, IndiaSpend reported in June 2018.

While India’s public-health spending was estimated to be 1.4% of GDP in 2017-18, the equivalent proportion of GDP spent on health in the Maldives is 9.4%, in Sri Lanka 1.6%, in Bhutan 2.5% and in Thailand 2.9%.

India is the fifth largest defence spender in the world. The defence budget in 2017-18 was Rs 4.31 lakh crore ($ 72.1 billion, using 2017 rates), or 2.5% of GDP, as per Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses, a think-tank. This is double the health budget that year, according to our analysis.

About a fourth of the defence budget, or 24%, goes towards pensions.
 

Source: Economic Survey 2017-18, Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses

In 2017, India’s school education budget, including central and state spending, was about Rs 4.41 lakh crore ($ 73.8 billion) or 2.6% of GDP, more than defence and health separately. However, almost half of India’s grade V students cannot read a grade II text and more than 70% cannot carry out division, according to the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2018, IndiaSpend reported in January 2019.

India had the second-lowest score for quality of education in South Asia in 2016 (66 out of a possible 100, just ahead of Afghanistan’s 64) and behind group leader Sri Lanka (75), IndiaSpend reported on September 25, 2018.

Health and education need more money
While India’s health budget is rising–in 2018 it was double of what it was in 2010–as IndiaSpend reported in January 2019, it is still inadequate, considering that India is home to a third of the world’s stunted children, has the highest number of tuberculosis patients and reports among the world’s highest out-of-pocket expenditure, an indicator of public healthcare failures.

The National Health Policy of 2017 talked about increasing public-health spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2025, but India has not yet met the 2010 target of 2% of GDP, IndiaSpend reported in April 2017.

The National Policy on Education, which guides India’s approach to education, has since 1968 recommended a minimum spending of 6% GDP on education but that target has never been met. There have been “pervasive and persistent failures in implementation leading to sub-optimal utilisation of the resources provided”, the 2016 document said.

(Yadavar is a principal correspondent with IndiaSpend.)

Courtesy: India Spend

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