It’s been a year since schools in India have been shut down due to the pandemic. Girls have been affected the most due to this. The Malala Fund predicts in a report that nearly 20 million secondary school girls could drop because of the pandemic.
A large number of these can be Indian girls. More than ever, inclusive policies and funds are needed to improve girls’ education in India. However, is this being reflected in the budget allocation of the Union Budget?
The Union Budget 2021
In 1968, the National Education Policy declared that 6% of the nation’s GDP should be spent on education. But this mark was never met to date. According to the Economic Survey, India spent only 2.8% of the GDP on education each year from 2014 to 2019. The spending increased to a mere 3.0% and 3.5% of the GDP respectively in 2019-20 and 2020-21 financial years.
In 2020-21, while the budget estimate for education was ₹99,312 crores, it was revised to ₹85,089 crores because of school closures. This year, the union budget allocated ₹93,224.31 crores to the Ministry of Education.
There is a 6.13% decline in budget allocation compared to last year. Out of this, ₹38,350 crores is for the Department of Higher Education and ₹54,874 crores for the Department of School Education. Some of the most important schemes saw a budget cut this year.
Massive Fund Cuts In Schemes
The National Scheme For Incentive To Girls For Secondary Education (NSIGSE), launched in 2008, is a centrally sponsored scheme. It promotes enrollment and reduces the dropout rate of secondary school girls from the SC/ST communities. In addition, this scheme helps in retaining girls in secondary schools until the age of 18. But according to the Union Budget 2021, this scheme was allocated one crore as compared to ₹110 crores in the last year.
The Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan, an integrated scheme for school education that aids in inclusive and quality education for all. It saw a budget cut to ₹31,050.16 crores from ₹38,750.50 crores the previous year. This makes ensuring education’s share of national and state budgets to reach 6% of GDP as mandated by the National Education Policy 2020 a far off goal.
Schemes for single girl child at various levels of education have not been functional for two academic years. It puts the strain on girls to find funds for themselves, and they drop out before thinking of pursuing higher education.
Increasing the budget allocation for these schemes could have been a great way to retain girls in school. It will also help re-enrol girls who dropped out during the pandemic. But the government chose to cut the budget rather than increase it for these schemes.
With “Inclusive Development for Aspirational India” as one of the six pillars in the budget proposal of 2021-2022, the lack of allocations to improve gender inclusivity stands as the biggest irony. Though the National Education Policy 2020 has proposed a Gender Inclusion Fund to advance quality education for girls, there was no mention of it in the Union Budget of 2021.
The Digital Divide: Starker In The Pandemic
According to the survey conducted by the Right to Education Forum in 5 states, it is shown that only 26% of girls had access to devices whenever they wanted as compared to 37% of boys. The lack of offline schools also raised the issues of lack of nutrition as mid-day meals stopped and the lack of availability of Sanitary pads. None of these issues can be solved if a specific budget is not allotted towards girls’ education.
Instead of allocating the budget to improve girls’ education in the country, the government chose to proceed with budget cuts and disregard the gendered impact of these allocations. In hindsight, if this keeps continuing, many girls may never return to school, and it will just undo years of efforts to bridge the gender parity in education.
The author is a Kaksha Correspondent as a part of writers’ training program under Kaksha Crisis.