Public Provisioning for Elementary Education in India

There are several concerns central to the contemporary discourse on public provisioning of elementary education in India. These range from the adequacy of public expenditure, the composition of such expenditure, to bottlenecks in the States that could be restricting the impact of this expenditure on educational attainments. While a lot of credible research has been done on the Central Government s budgetary provisions for education, not much is known about the intricacies of the States provisions for this sector, especially the possible changes in the era of reforms. The book probes into these intricacies in financing of education by state governments and highlights the major challenges confronting them. In order to understanding these intricacies, the book also analyzes the planning process with regard to expenditure on education and the process of flow of funds starting from the Central Government budget up to the implementing agencies at the district level. The latter is attempted through a tracking of budget expenditures and the budgetary and planning processes in the current flagship program of Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) across four selected states viz. Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Gujarat, and Rajasthan. Demystifying the central problems in government financing of education in India would also need to address questions relating to the causes of the fiscal crisis of state governments in an era of economic reforms, the measures required for strengthening the ability of the states to step up public expenditure on education and the role of centrally sponsored schemes in education. The book addresses these issues with specific focus on the elementary education sector in the context of the ongoing efforts towards universalizing elementary education (UEE) in the country