India has miles and miles to go before it can boast of its agenda of inclusive growth. The country has 8.6 million children out of school, 46.5 per cent of its population lives below the poverty line, the maternal mortality rate is 453 per 1,00,000 live births and nearly 18 per cent of its labour force has received formal education till the secondary level. This, despite years of so-called ambitious flagship programme, mega investments and tall claims by successive governments.
Blame it on bureaucratic sloth or complacency of policy makers or outdated delivery mechanism or even outright corruption in the implementation of the programmes. The fact is that the power of spin doctors to transform outlays into outcomes is not reflected in the performance of flagship programmes that almost all governments since the 1970s have been showcasing. From women and child development schemes to the Sarv Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA), to rural employment generation programme – all are caught in a complex web of delayed decision making, non-utilisation of funds and sluggishness, against a backdrop of great expectations. The result; India even after more than 70 years of Independence is miserably lagging behind in critical indicators of human development like poverty reduction, universal education, elimination of gender discrimination and better health for women and children. It also puts India far behind in fulfilling its commitment to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The government regularly harps on how allocations have been stepped up in all programmes, but it is not able to spend those outlays fruitfully. Primarily, there should be concerted efforts to plug leakages and improve implementation management.
Reduction of child mortality by improving nutritional and health status of children in the age group 0 to 6 years and providing pre-school education has been at the core of the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) that has been running since 1975. It is the world’s largest children’s nutrition programme, supposedly reaching out to 75 million children and 18 million mothers through daily nutritional supplements in nearly one million anganwadi centers. Yet, India ranks among the countries with the highest under-five mortality rates.
India is lagging behind in the top MDG aim of eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, a key indicator of which is the highest prevalence of underweight children. The issue here really is the government’s ability to put the money where its mouth is – progress will depend upon how effectively the country is able to scale up interventions that are known to improve maternal and child nutrition. The government needs to spend considerable amount of funds to meet the expansion needs of anganwadis, as the effect of insufficient funds is directly visible on the children attending anganwadis, with 44 per cent suffering from malnutrition.
True, India’s spiraling food prices, triggered to some extent by high global prices, have set the clock back on tackling hunger and malnutrition among children, but what’s worse is the sheer ineffectiveness of the Mid-day Meal Scheme (MDMS) launched in 1995. Aimed at enhancing enrolment and retention by improving nutritional levels among students in primary classes, the MDMS supposedly reaches out to almost 12 crore students with the calorific value of a mid-day meal at the upper primary stage fixed at a minimum of 700 calories and 20 gm of protein. A Planning Commission survey on the scheme, however, reveals poor monitoring. Most States do not follow the guidelines of the Union government to deliver the foodgrain at the school point, resulting in leakages. Neither has the scheme made any significant difference in its core objective of improving enrolment in schools.
Clearly, the government’s gamble that mid-day meals would lead to retention of children in schools has not paid off, taking the shine away from the SSA. Its objective was to bring all children in school, bridge all gender and social category gaps at the primary stage itself, achieve universal retention and focus on elementary education of desirable quality. The outcome is most unsatisfactory. Household surveys have thrown up a figure of about 20 million children enrolling but not attending school. With many primary schools – 12 to 14 per cent – functioning as single-teacher schools, that is one teacher for five grades, the SSA objective of quality elementary education is tough to achieve.
It is not that India lacks resources. The budgetary allocations are pumped up by a cess of 2 per cent on all the central taxes and duties and generous funding of external agencies. Even then, India spends only 3-4 per cent of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on basic needs like education even as the government mulls a hike in infrastructure spending from 6 to 8 per cent of the GDP.
Worse, increased private investment in secondary education remains a low priority, that too at a time when trends show a rising demand by industry for skills that require at least a secondary education and which, in turn, will create a vibrant labour force drawing higher salaries. Instead, India’s response to the need of creating a well-remunerated labour market has at best been a series of rural employment guarantee schemes like the Swarnjayanti Gram Swarozgar Yojana (SGSY) and the more recent Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS). But the MGNREGS too has fallen prey to corrupt practices like large scale misappropriation of funds and delayed payment of wages.
Obviously, there is an urgent need to remove all deficiencies in the implementation of the various schemes. The government must undertake a serious review of their effectiveness and improving implementation management on the ground. It is only political will that can re-orient the system towards development goals.
(The writer is a freelance journalist)
