Ved Pratap Vaidik’s yet-to-be-published bombshell “interview” with Hafiz Saeed, believed to be the mastermind of the 26/11 terror attacks in Mumbai, has taken some of the buzz out of the Union Budget. But the verbal jousts are still on. Was finance minister Arun Jaitley’s Budget 2014 more about continuity than change? Why didn’t a pro-business government, dare to be more radical? A lot has been said on all these questions. A lot more will be said in the coming days. Only the incurably ignorant are shocked that post-election Modinomics is turning out to be different from what many Modi supporters have been hoping for.
In the number-crunching that typically follows the Union Budget every year, the focus is on outlays. But there is another equally critical question: how money is spent and why it is not spent? The money that is being allocated for development is not delivering expected results because of several reasons. One is corruption. Then there is the less buzzy issue of an acute shortage of human resources. This is severely impacting programme implementation on the ground.
India invests far less resources in the social sector compared to its peers. What is allocated often does not achieve its intended goal because the country just does not have people who can plan and execute programmes on the ground. There is a dearth of trained teachers, doctors, para-medical personnel, anganwadi workers and so on. There is also a shortage of staff to supervise public programmes and projects.
This is one of the key reasons why allocated public resources are not utilised or under-utilised.
“What is lacking is a well-functioning lower bureaucracy. You can have good officers at the top but if there are very few trained people at the bottom, implementation will suffer. There is a freeze on hiring. In course of my field work I found that even in a relatively better-governed state like Tamil Nadu, many panchayats have only one clerk to do all the administrative work… This is bound to hit programme delivery,” says Dr Vinoj Abraham, an economist working at the Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram.
Or take education, a crucial building block of any successful nation. In his Budget speech, Mr Jaitley noted, “Elementary education is one of the major priorities of the government.” He drew attention to the gap in providing school infrastructure and announced that the government “would strive to provide toilets and drinking water in all schools for girls.”
All this is good news. But the tragedy of India’s elementary education is that while enrollment is going up, learning outcomes remain pitiable. Why is this so? Learning outcomes depend greatly on the atmosphere in which children are learning.
The latest Economic Survey tells us that the teacher-classroom ratio is going down. There has been a decline in the proportion of schools with at least one classroom per teacher, from 76.2 per cent in 2010 to 73.8 per cent in 2013. The exceptions are AP, Bihar, Gujarat, Haryana, J&K Jharkhand, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Mizoram.
A report released by the New Delhi-based Centre for Budget and Governance Accountabilty (CBGA) points out that “though there is an improvement in SSA (Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan) allocation over the years, the problem in utilisation of funds allocated for SSA and other schemes in education have been a matter of serious concern. As reported by the MHRD, nearly 25 per cent of the funds allocated by the Centre and states for SSA remain unutilised. The shortage of human resources in the education sector is one of the major reasons for under-utilisation of fund. However, this issue is not reflected in the budgetary allocations.”
Look at healthcare, another critical area. Budget 2014 has two key initiatives — the Free Drug Service and the Free Diagnosis Service to achieve “Health for All.” Then there is the Nirbhaya Fund. The UPA had allocated Rs 1,000 crore to the Nirbhaya Fund for women’s safety. The ministries were asked to formulate proposals so that the fund could be used. Despite the high decibel discourse on violence against women after the horrific incident on December 16, 2012, the money under the Nirbhaya Fund remained unutilised in 2013-2014. Now, in the Budget, three programmes related to women’s safety under the Nirbhaya Fund have been announced.
At a recent panel discussion on “Assessing priorities for women in the Union Budget”, organised by UN Women, activists flagged many of these concerns. Public-private partnership, the Big Idea of the new government, can solve part of the problem. But in a country where one among every three is desperately poor, there is no getting away from the government’s pivotal role in the social sector.
There are many questions: Where are the workers who will translate promises into functioning programmes? Why are those slogging away in the field so poorly remunerated? Till we are prepared to have a discussion on these, promises risk remaining just that.
The writer focuses on development issues in India and emerging economies.
She can be reached at patralekha.chatterjee@gmail.com
