Quality of education determines the future of a nation and for that matter of a State. The consequences of quality of education on the future of its citizens is a non-debtable truth. One needs to look at what are the parameters that should guide the present government in ensuring the quality of education and securing future for its citizen and of the nation.
The state can no longer shed its responsibility of ensuring elementary education to all children within the state. This is evident from Article 14 (Right to equality) of the constitution if read with (Article 39 (f)) (Right to equal opportunities and facilities to develop in a healthy manner and in conditions of freedom and dignity and guaranteed protection of childhood and youth against exploitation and against moral and material abandonment) and (Article 45) (Right to early childhood care and education to all children until they complete the age of six years) and now by Article 21A.
In addition to the above constitutional mandate, one needs to consider that India having ratified the Child Rights Convention of 1989 is obliged to ensure the best interest of the child in all governmental actions and policy decisions. The government is funding or financing the education of the child and providing grant in aid to educational institutions is one of the methods by which these objective is sought to be achieved.
The time has come to revisit the system of grant-in-aid to educational institutions to ensure that the objective of providing quality education and now compulsory elementary education, is achieved by the scheme of grant-in-aid. One also needs to remember grant-in-aid is neither a charity nor a favoritism but fulfillment of a governmental basic constitutional obligation towards the children of the State. Therefore the focus and purpose of analysis of any such method of funding should be to ensure how best these benefits reach those to whom it is meant especially when it is an entitlement for them.
Any system of government funding of education should necessarily deal with all the anomalies in the existing grant in aid scheme and in ensuring the quality of education is at par to every child
Redefining Grant-in-aid:
For Grant-in-aid Institutions: Primarily the funding should be the child’s education and not the institution but funding has to be necessarily carried out through the institution only. As a preliminary step there is need to assess the cost of education per child in the State. This cost assessment has to be done scientifically and should be separate for primary education, secondary education, higher secondary education and for collegiate and University education. Such assessment should primarily consider the Teachers and support staff, requirement and remuneration and also the establishment cost for running the institution. There are well defined parameters for carrying out such an assessment.
Once per child cost is determined, the grant in aid to an institution should be based on the number of students admitted in such institution. Such amount less the actual fees collected from the students would be the actual grant in aid, amount of the year.
There would be administrative issues because of the existing anomalies in the present funding. There could be functional remedies to all such anomalies by hypothetically arriving at a figure and providing a system of bulk grant estimate for every block of three years or five years by creating a reserve fund and all salaries being paid out of this fund and the government replenishing such funds periodically to meet the salary expenses.
Private Institution. Whenever a private institution levies fees beyond such amount then the State government should ensure that such additional levy should result in appointment of additional, better qualified and better paid teachers.
Differential fee structures
In the student based determination of grant-in-aid certain factors need to be built in by appropriately categorizing the students into local student, Other state student, Goan NRI student, other NRI student and foreign student. The fee structure of each category needs to be determined accordingly, needless to mention that it should be in the increasing order, so much so that the last of the category i.e. the foreign student fee should be sufficient to meet his actual education expenses plus 10 to 20 per cent more, with NRI student the fees should meet his actual educational expenses. These are categories where the state is not at all obliged to subsidise elementary or even higher education.
With differential fee structure at all levels the government should remove the existing anomaly of government aided and self financing courses/institution system.. A fair and just, student based grant in aid scheme will certainly eliminate these anomalies and injustices even in the higher education in Goa.
(The writer is a professor of Law and former Dean of Faculty of Law of Goa University.)
