Rethinking Budget Priorities: The Case for Education Investment
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No matter what surprises the FM’s budget did or did not contain, going by past performance one thing was a dead certainty; the budgetary allocation for defence (guns, bombs, planes, ships and other military hardware) and for subsidies (fertilizers, kerosene, diesel, food grains, etc) is far in excesses of the allocation for education. Well so what’s wrong with that? Shouldn’t protecting the nation’s borders against external threat be given top priority, along with looking after the basic physical needs of the economically weakest sections of society? The nation certainly needs protection. But it needs protection not just from external threat but also from increasing internal threat, as represented by so called Maoists and growing bands of home grown terrorists, whatever be their purported ideology, green or saffron. Guns and tanks and other military hardware are perhaps not the most effective form of defence against such internal threats.
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Similarly, the poorest of the poor in our country - and there are a shamefully enormous number of them also need protection from suffering even more economic hardship than they are already exposed to. But is the continuous giving of more and more subsidies the best way of protecting them? Some would argue that by creating a dependency on handouts, the protracted doling out of subsidies doesn’t alleviate poverty and economic disparity and hardship but only entrenches such inequalities. There is a strategy admittedly with a long term time horizon which could effectively counter both the internal threat of Maosim and terrorism and that of persistent poverty. That strategy is education. It is largely, though not always, the lack of education and the accompanying lack of opportunity for economic and social advancement that help to swell the ranks and files of Maoists and other extremists. Again, it is lack of education that is the root cause of chronic poverty: basic literacy can ever be.
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So why is it that the government spends over six times as much on weapons and on subsidies than it does on education? In 2012, India reportedly spent Rs.1,93,407 crore on defence. Rs.1,90,015 crore on subsidies and Rs.28.679 crore on education. Why does the government give such comparatively low priority to education as compared with defence and subsidies? Could it possibly be because both defence and subsidies reinforce the protective mai baap role of the sarkar and increase rather than reduce our sense of dependence on it? Education on the other hand, breeds a sense of self-confidence and self-dependence, a can do will do attitude that doesn’t need to rely on sarkari handouts. As a socially and economically liberating force, education has no parallel.
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It is this liberating aspect of education which makes it so dangerous. Dangerous, that is, for any system of government which has, over time, ensured that the vast majority of the people over whom it presides are never freed from their day to day patronage of their rulers. In a democracy, especially in a deeply flawed democracy like ours, education frees citizens from the shackles of governmental dependency. Which is why when it comes to education the sarkari response can be summed up as: Edukashion? Wot’s that?
