Economic Survey Alarm on Fall in Government Spending in Education Sparks Privatisation Fear
Basant Kumar Mohanty | 23 July 2024 | The Telegraph
The latest Economic Survey, the document on the state of the economy, presented a dismal picture of education spending by the Union and state governments and offered vocational studies with community support as the way forward to train human resource.
The Economic Survey of 2023-24 tabled in Parliament on Monday suggested that expenditure on education in terms of its share in GDP, its share in total expenditure by Union and state governments together and its share in total expenditure on social services have declined compared to the pre-Covid-19 year 2019-20.
The expenditure on education by the Union and state governments together was 2.9 per cent of the GDP in 2010-20. It has declined to 2.7 in 2023-24, according to the budgetary estimates. The expenditure on education with respect to the total spending on social services also declined from 10.7 per cent to 9.2 per cent in this period.
Educationists fear an increased involvement of private entities in the education sector in the years to come, resulting in a commensurate increase in denial of access to education to the poor and socially deprived sections such as the Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs) and Other Backward Classes (OBCs)….