Indians high on school spending, says study

A Unesco report says Indians are among the biggest spenders on schooling for their children, but the figure halves when it comes to higher studies, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Oct 12, 2007, 02:04:23 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Indians are among the biggest spenders on school education for their children, but the figure halves when it comes to higher studies, a Unesco report has stated.

An Indian family spends an average 28 per cent of its income in school education. That puts India after Nigeria (48 per cent) and Chile (38 per cent). But for university education, Indians spend only 14 per cent, thus benefiting better-off students, said the Global Education Digest 2007.

“Systems that are overly reliant on private contributions, especially at the primary level of education, raise the risk of excluding students from poorer families,” it said.

The report comes a day after Union HRD minister Arjun Singh called higher education the “sick child” of Indian education and asked academicians to make it more accessible and inclusive.

In India, the fee in private high schools, which cater to a large number of students, was the cause for high spending. University education, on the other had, was highly subsidised by the government, an HRD ministry official said.

The report suggested that household expenditure on school education was less in other countries as the main flow of funds came from public institutions.

But in India, a substantial part of the public education budget was channelled to private institutions. “It is the result of a system by which the government contracts private schools to help meet demand for schooling exceeding the public system,” it said.

The report said the expenditure on school education can be reduced by financing subsidies as scholarships, grants and loans to cover education related costs.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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