As thousands of government schools close and health funds stagnate, Centre prioritises building roads over uplifting people, crippling our demographic dividend
After the students' protest against repeated leaks of exam papers, attention has now shifted to the abysmal state of education in India.
According to a recent report, some 94,000 government schools have been closed down over the past 10 years. This in a country where education, especially in rural areas, is pitifully inadequate, even non-existent in some places.
Not surprisingly, the inexplicable action of closing government schools has led to a substantial drop in overall school enrolment. A corresponding rise in private school numbers should not surprise anyone either.
Enrolment falls
Families in the lower income bracket, especially in villages, know education is their only chance to give their children a better future. The closure of government schools is a brutal setback. It places a heavier burden on low-income rural and marginalised communities who rely on affordable public schools in the neighbourhood.
The mid-day meal offered by government schools is a particularly crucial support for families by providing one hot, nutritious meal to children who really need it.
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There is another factor in the case of primary schools. The longer walking distance to private schools, far from the neighbourhood, triggers higher school dropouts, especially for young children and girl students. This unfortunate development is accompanied by official statistics that should be alarming for a country that has such challenges in the education sector and where large numbers of children and young people are not able to access a decent education.
Budget priority
There is a reliable metric for assessing whether a sector has gained or lost importance in government policy. That metric is the budget allocated to it.
The share of education in the Union Budget has declined significantly over the past 12 years. This raises questions about the government’s priorities and the relative importance being given to education.
The Education Ministry’s share in the Union Budget fell from 4.6 per cent in 2013-14 to just 2.5 per cent in 2025-26. This means education gets approximately half the money today compared to what it got 12 years ago.
The budget cut indicates that despite education remaining a fundamental requirement for India’s social and economic development, its relative priority in government spending has declined.
Skill building
Linked to education is the government programme on skill building. Training to upgrade skills in different sectors was started in the form of the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) established around 2008. This was later given a higher focus in 2015 in the shape of the Skill India Mission and the National Skill Development Mission.
Despite the importance of skill building and the government’s emphasis on Skill India, the actual allocation to the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship has remained bafflingly minuscule. It started in 2015 with an embarrassing 0.06 per cent of the annual budget and sank further to 0.05 per cent by the time we came to 2025- 2026.
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The much-touted Skill India Mission is languishing at a measly 0.05 per cent of the annual budget. How will our youth, especially rural youth, get any skills to get decent jobs, turn entrepreneurs, or become income generators?
Rural healthcare neglected
The healthcare situation is no beacon of hope either. Look at the teeming numbers of patients from rural India thronging the hospital corridors, standing in mile-long queues in cities like Delhi, Lucknow, Patna…any city really.
The reason: there is very poor healthcare available in villages. Primary Health Care Centres (PHCs) don’t have medicines and are severely under-staffed; district hospitals are better but seriously lacking in quality healthcare. The result is that everyone flocks to urban centres where medical care is available.
The fact is that access to healthcare in India is highly inequitable. Cities have all the benefits: world-class hospitals, medical specialists, and the latest medicines. Rural areas, on the other hand, have to deal with doctor shortages, inadequate facilities, and limited access to essential care.
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Even in government hospitals, urban centres have more than twice the number of hospital beds compared to villages. Urban areas, in addition, have a massive density of private tertiary-care hospitals. Over 80 per cent of speciality-qualified doctors practice in major cities, leaving rural PHCs devoid of specialists like surgeons, cardiologists, orthopaedists or paediatricians. Medical services like advanced diagnostics, intensive care units (ICUs), and multi-speciality care remain predominantly urban too.
Burden of rural poor
Since quality medical care is almost exclusively urban-centric, rural people must travel long distances and incur high out-of-pocket expenses for major medical needs.
In this grossly unjust backdrop, let us examine the government’s budget allocation for healthcare. The health budget has remained largely stagnant over the years, fluctuating between 0.5 per cent and 1.9 per cent of the GDP. That’s a shame for a country with such large challenges in the health sector and such a large disease burden in rural areas.
The decline or stagnation in government spending on education and health is extremely worrying for the future of India’s youth. Our demographic dividend, which should have been the motor for the country’s growth, has been hamstrung in the absence of support and has become a demographic burden.
What comes next shows the almost dystopian nature of government spending.
Roads get priority
As education, skill training and health are treated as (very) poor cousins, the roads and highways sector gets substantial support. The share of the Ministry of Road Transport & Highways in the Union Budget has almost trebled over the past 12 years, rising to nearly 6 per cent of the total budget in 2021-22 and it hasn’t changed substantially after that.
Now, it can’t be anyone’s case that roads and highways must not be built. We all agree that better connectivity is a good thing. But not ahead of essential requirements like health and education.
Not supporting health and education is a gross injustice since it affects the poor disproportionately. It is also a clear violation of the rights of all citizens to get equal access to the state’s resources, which are the resources created by taxes paid by the public.
(The Federal seeks to present views and opinions from all sides of the spectrum. The information, ideas or opinions in the articles are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Federal.)
