The Delhi government spent Rs 7,220 per month in educating a child in a state-run school in 2006-07, rivalling the tuition fees of the most expensive of private schools in India’s capital. But, the same government spent around Rs 75 for a child per month in another government school in the same city.
This wide disparity in funding state-run schools is being cited as discriminatory and a non-government organisation has filed public interest litigation (PIL) against the Delhi government in the Delhi High Court.
Centre for Civil Society, a New Delhi-based liberal public policy think tank, collected data from 283 government schools in the New Delhi by filing numerous Right to Information (RTI) applications.
Results from the study revealed that there is a huge variation in the way government funds the state-run schools. “Even if we remove the outliers (referring to extreme data points like Rs 7,220 and Rs 75), the variations between the schools are huge and its hard to believe,” said Parth J Shah, president, Centre of Civil Society.
After collecting the data from 283 schools in Delhi, the educational institutions were ranked based on per capita student funding (PCF), which tells what is the spend per child in a government school. The formula is the ratio between total funds (both Plan and non-Plan funds) and total number of students.
Plan funds relate to spend on book bank, school library, uniforms for students and school extension programme. Non-Plan funds relate to salaries of staff, expenditure for electricity, water, telephone and purchase and repair of furniture.
Though some high numbers could be explained because of construction happening in that year or bunch of teachers retiring in that academic year, Shah said it is unlikely to explain the huge variation in the range between Rs 10,000 and Rs 40,000 PCF per year, which has removed the outliers in either end (below Rs 10,000 and more than Rs 40,000). “We don’t know the reason and that is why we have filed this PIL,” he added.
The Delhi education minister could not be reached for comments, while a questionnaire sent to Krishna Kumar, director of National Council of Education Research and Training (NCERT), went unanswered. The PIL filed by the NGO had come for hearing twice this year, but the Delhi government sought additional time to reply on both occasions. The next hearing is slated to come in the third week of October.
“An analysis based on the empirical data so collected, reveals that the respondent’s (Delhi government) allocation of funds to the schools run by it is without any criterion or basis, is whimsical, capricious and therefore violative of Article 14 (of the Constitution),” said the petition.
More than government spending, it could also be due to lack of initiative from individual school authorities. “Funding is fairly adequate and very often it is not utilised properly,” said Prachi Kalra, who is training government teachers in a Delhi-based college.
She said often government teachers don’t know how to spend Rs 500 given to them for purchasing classroom material, adding that teachers need to be trained how to utilise the money.
The concept of per capita student funding is now widely accepted in many countries as an equitable way of funding government schools. For example, in Canada, PCF is being used to improve the accountability of government-run schools.
In India too, Shah said we could adopt this method to say that students from the disadvantaged sections of the society (scheduled tribes and scheduled castes) could be given additional PCF, so that schools were motivated to enroll them.
