India Budget Explorer

Chapter one

Sixty years, and no closer

6% of GDP: the target the Education Commission set in 1966. The national policies of 1968 and 1986 adopted it, and the 2020 policy committed the centre and the states to reach it “at the earliest”.

is what the Union and the states together spent through their education departments in . It is the figure behind the Economic Survey's “2.7 per cent”.

is the same spending counted more widely, adding the education and training run by other departments. It is the figure behind the “about four per cent” that PRS and the World Bank cite.

separate two honest answers to the same question — and even the wider count leaves India short of its own target.

Two decades of the same answer

Chapter two

The Union's budget alone has three sizes

Before the states come into it, the Union's own education budget has no single size. Three defensible definitions give three totals for the same year, and each one gets quoted as “the education budget”.

Measure Basis

Chapter three

The bigger spender is the one nobody argues about

is what the Union budgets for education, sports and culture in , on the account heads every government in India uses.

is what the states and union territories budget on the same heads, in the same year.

Education is on the Concurrent List, so both governments run it, but the states do most of the spending. Part of it is the Union's money: since 2014-15 its grants for schemes the two run together have passed through state budgets and are counted there, which is why the same comparison stood at .

However it is counted

Chapter four

Education is losing its place in state budgets

States have not cut social spending: it took of their budgets in and takes now. Education has lost ground inside it, from of state social spending to .

Every state, every year since 1990-91

Measure

Chapter five

Budgeted is not spent

Each year's education budget is announced in February, revised a year later and audited a year after that. From the Ministry of Education spent, on average, of what it was first given. Since it has averaged .

Chapter six

Most of the ministry's money becomes state money

The Ministry of Education's largest account head is not education. It is grants-in-aid to state governments: in , against the Union books as general education itself.

Chapter seven

Against everything else

is the whole Union budget for . Each tile is one ministry or department, drawn to scale.

of it goes on interest on past borrowing — the single largest claim on the budget.

goes to the Ministry of Education. For every rupee it receives, the Union pays in interest.

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Appendix

The account heads every government shares

Major head 2202 means general education in a state budget exactly as it does in the Union's. That shared classification is what makes it possible to compare the two governments at all, and it is the basis of chapter three.

Heads