An Early Childhood Education perspective on budget 2022–23 : India
“A budget is more than a series of numbers on a page. It is an embodiment of our values” — Barack Obama
The Union Budget launch on February 1st, 2022, by our Hon’ble Finance Minister, had us all waiting with high hopes and apprehension to confirm our suspicions of states putting their money behind their words and aspirations.
As an early educator, I had my eyes and ears peeled to better understand the allocations to education and dig deeper within that for Early Childhood Education. Understanding the budget is critical to us because it acts as an accountability tool and gives us a framework to better define how and where the government intends to invest efforts towards change.
To put things into perspective, the Early Childhood Education [ECE] landscape has been buzzing with activity since early 2020 when the New National Education Policy [NEP] was released. The NEP placed a heavy emphasis in ensuring quality early childhood education for every child. As a follow up, the implementation guidelines for this outlined by the NIPUN Bharath mission also calls for concrete measures towards building high quality play based curriculum for preschool, deliver compulsory pre-primary education through a collaborative effort of 4 departments [Women and Child Development, Dept. of Education, Dept of Health and Tribal Welfare] , focus on teacher professional development and parent education. As different states define their roadmaps towards this much needed effort, there is very little clarity on which of these efforts will gain momentum. The budget for ECE stands to play a critical role in this regard.
“The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 was launched last year with a huge fanfare. It advocated that 6 percent of GDP should be allocated to the education sector. But, this year’s budget comes down to less than 2 per cent. The education budget may have crossed a landmark of 1 lakh crore but it has been decreasing as a percentage of total expenditure,” said Anil Swaroop, former secretary, Department of School Education and Literacy, Government of India.
Numerically speaking, the education budget sees an increase of about 11% this year [though, as an overall percentage spend it continues to decline] but to meet the 6 percent GDP target it should have almost doubled from that of last year.
Now within this, if one looks specifically at the early years [the period from birth to the age of 6; before a child enters grade 1 in school], we can examine budget allocations in 2 ways:
- Overall improvements/shifts in the Dept. of Women and Child Development [WCD] budget to be able to effectively deliver health, nutrition, early stimulation and early education via its various schemes and provisions
- Specific budget allocated to Early Education and Teacher Training within the WCD or the Ministry of Education at a centre / state level
As a lay person looking to better understand and find these numbers, after hours of reading, research and conversations, one first finds that it is quite impossible to find accurate numbers specific to ECE in public documents. Here is a brief account of these presented as key highlights:
Overall shifts in the WCD budget to be able to effectively deliver health, nutrition, early stimulation and early education via its various schemes and provisions:
- WCD allocation has seen a drop of about 7.56% this year
- A gradual and consistent drop similar to this is observed in the last decade
- In 2014, India spent 0.2% of GDP towards pre-primary education.
- Data between 2017–2020 shows that states and UTs have only been able to utilize 34% [approximately] of the funds released which points to a major failure of administrative machinery and process
A global report on Early Childhood Education released in 2017 recommended that national governments should increase the overall share of national resources for education and begin reorienting their education budgets to ensure two years of free pre-primary, with funding in place by 2020 to allocate at least 10% of their education budget to this sector. [India is currently between 2–3% based on my analysis of various sources]
“While domestic financing will be the largest source of funding to meet the SDGs, targeted support by international donors will be crucial, especially for the poorest countries which require the largest relative increases in resources to meet the targets by 2030. Pre-primary education will require the largest increases in resources between now and 2030, meaning that the annual growth in ODA levels to pre-primary will need to outpace disbursements made to other levels in order to realistically be on track to achieving the goals by 2030 .”
We also heard the budget announcement highlighting the allocation of funds towards upgrading 2 lakh anganwadis under ‘Saaksham Anganwadis’ but little is said about how much of this allocation is earmarked for the upgradation as there is a pre-defined plan for the Saksham Anganwadi budget from the earlier years. The budget allocated for Saksham Anganwadi and POSHAN 2.0 (Umbrella ICDS — Anganwadi Services, Poshan Abhiyan, Scheme for Adolescent Girls) was Rs 20,263 crore, a small increase from Rs 20,105 crore in 2021–22. However, a bifurcation of the allocated spend for each service under this umbrella finds no mention in the budget documents. With little said about the actual spend/utilization of this budget , it remains to be seen what shifts this intends to bring in better delivery of services.
When it comes to a focused budget for early ‘Education’ a closer look at the WCD budget allocations often only has a single line item pertaining to Early Learning Kits for the anganwadis. With the NEP emphasizing on creating spaces for foundational learning, government systems are yet to walk the talk by allocating resources within the WCD and MoE budgets specifically to further quality pre-primary education.
The Karnataka state government has announced 30 Crores as an amount designated to improve early Education in 20,000 Anganwadis. Karnataka has 60,000+ Anganwadis. If one looks even at these twenty thousand, this budget accounts for less than Rs. 15,000 per year , per anganwadi towards improving quality, curriculum inputs and other ECE focussed actions.
The impact of a quality ECE program is long term and an investment today will lead to a generation level shift in learning and life outcomes. While we must invest in remediating, helping children catch up in terms of numeracy, literacy, STEM and more, these are short term actions, necessary firefighting at best. Effective leadership must keep sight of both arms if education progress is to be accelerated. What we see here is a very short sighted allocation.
Historically, almost all developing countries spend almost 100 times more on tertiary education v/s pre-primary education and this budget does not shift that perspective.
The budget places a giant focus on ICT and digital education as a means to manage learning loss and this is a welcome move in terms of addressing issues of access. In parallel, we must consider enabling this effort by investing in quality content creation and research within the early education space to ensure that children and parents can make the most of these channels.
Lastly, while technology can be an enabler, a skilled, well equipped workforce of early educators is pivotal in realising the global vision of quality early education for every child before 2030. While the NEP makes some excellent recommendations to make training accessible to teachers on the go, we see a tremendous drop in budgets from teacher training from 250 to 127 Cr this year as we come up short yet again in catering to the needs of our already lacking teacher populations.
For the first time in the history of India, even the National Family Health Survey [NFHS -5] placed a spotlight on pre-primary education by surveying the number of children below the age of 5 attending preschool during the pandemic years [National Avg — 13.6%]. This should be a reminder for the centre and states to prioritize Early Education and effectively make budgetary allocations to ensure every child enters grade 1 on equal footing.
As a country committed to ensuring that we achieve the sustainable development goals outlined by the UN to create safe, joyful and enriching childhoods for young children, our budget, sadly, does not live up to our expectations in providing for its youngest population. A specific budget allocation for Early Childhood Education upwards of 10–15% of the overall education budget is essential if we want to ensure better futures for our children and achieve our vision of an equitable India@100.
