Health & education are nobody’s baby

PRIME Minister Narendra Modi looked incredibly natty on TV, in his olive-green bandgala and light-brown shades as he stood at the memorial in Kargil on Friday and scolded Pakistan for its continuing support to cross-border terrorism — 25 years on, clearly some things haven’t changed.

The truth is, we are all guilty. The ruling party and the entire Opposition have blood on their hands.

But back here in Chandigarh, the Budget documents awaited study. For a minute it seemed that the sections on ‘Health’ and ‘Education’ were missing. Perhaps they had just leaked into the section that dealt with “taxing capital gains in the share market” — a category India’s stock market-crazy audience has carefully watched since the Budget was announced earlier in the week. Notably, the market reacted with some fury at the very mention of being leashed by Ms Sitharaman. But everyone knows that inside her Mangalagiri saris, Quiet Nirmala is a woman of indomitable will, going where both angels as well as former FM P Chidambaram feared to tread. She’s unlikely to be nicknamed ‘Rollback FM’.

Which brings us back to the other question: Why has Ms Sitharaman ignored the crying need to revamp, overhaul and modernise the aforesaid education and health sectors? Having risen to the top in an incredibly male-dominated political party, and before that having studied in Jawaharlal Nehru University, Nirmala has learnt well how to separate the wheat from the chaff, or good behaviour from bad. (For example, she is not known to throw files at her officials like her former colleague, Smriti Irani, reportedly did when she was Human Resource Development Minister in 2014.) Moreover, she respects data, even when it is hidden in plain sight.

She knows, for example, that it is plain wrong to compare Budgetary Estimates (BE) with Revised Estimates (RE) because the two are like chalk and cheese — the first is about outlay, while the second refers to actual money spent. So, saying that the health sector got an extra 12 per cent in funds this year by comparing this year’s BE with last year’s RE is plain incorrect, because it’s like comparing apples with oranges.

The right thing would be to compare this year’s BE (Rs 90,958.63 crore) with last year’s BE

(Rs 89,155 crore). That’s a paltry increase of Rs 1,803.63 crore, just 1.98 per cent extra in the Health Ministry’s budget. In addition, there is a pathetic 1.16 per cent increase for the National Health Mission and 1.4 per cent increase for PM-JAY, a scheme which targets 55 crore people at the lowest 40 per cent of the pile — both key components of Ayushman Bharat, the flagship health project of the Narendra Modi government, since it was launched in 2018.

So, how will this abysmal increase fund the elimination of tuberculosis (target 2025) or make child immunisation universal or fund the HPV vaccine rollout for girls and women against cervical cancer — as the last was promised in the Interim Budget in February?

Here, then, is the cold truth. The Budget expenditure on health continues to be a mere 1.9 per cent of the GDP, falling far short of the 2.5 per cent target set by the 2017 National Health Policy. Coming on the back of the Covid-19 pandemic, which hit India so hard (officially, about 532,000 people are said to have died), one would think that some lessons have been learnt. So, why has the Modi government refused to learn them?

The education sector is hardly far behind. Budget Estimates for last year were Rs 112,899.47 crore, going up to Rs 120,627.87 crore this year, a marginal increase of Rs 7,728.4 crore. According to the Economic Survey, funding for education as a share of the GDP has actually gone down to 2010 levels, from 2.8 per cent to 2.7 per cent (UNESCO says the global benchmark is 4-6 per cent). It won’t surprise you that China allocates 3.3 per cent of its GDP to education — and welcomes top foreign universities to open franchises — but if even Afghanistan in 2020 was allocating 2.8 per cent for education (since collapsed after the Taliban took power), something is radically wrong somewhere in New Delhi.

The clear answer to the question, Why Does India’s Political Class Not Care, if its children are educated or not, or healthy or not — has been answered by the private sector. Out-of-pocket expenditure in both areas has increased by leaps and bounds. In the new India, if you have the money, you can afford the best hospitals and the best schools and colleges — but if you don’t, you’re condemned to the sludge.

Two nations which got it right are the former Soviet Union — and its inheritor state, Russia — as well as China. It’s easy to condemn both as ‘Communist states’, meaning, democracies are argumentative, while Communists are authoritarian — as if that’s an excuse when it comes to the education of your children.

The fact is both Russia and China understood that an educated nation must impart quality education to all its children, not just a few who belong to the elite — so you start at the very beginning, by funding all primary schools and primary healthcare centres, across the length and breadth of the country. India’s southern states learnt fast — from Kerala, which learnt from its former Kings, like Swathi Thirunal, as well as EMS Namboodiripad’s Communist government, which then set the template for funding the social sector which survives up to this day.

So, at the end of the day, when all the hand-wringing and the moral outbursts are done, the answer to the ‘Why’ is fairly simple. Yes, education and health are not a priority for the BJP because paying attention to the stock market is more important, because it sends friendly signals to people at home as well as companies abroad to invest money in it.

Except, that’s the easy answer. The truth is, we are all guilty. The ruling party and the entire Opposition have blood on their hands — the BJP, the Congress, the Samajwadi Party, the DMK, NCP, Trinamool Congress and every other political party. None of us cares enough to put the BJP on the mat, to ask it tough questions on the lack of priority for education and health — because we are afraid the people may turn around and ask us those same questions. Why didn’t we do anything when we were in power?

So, we spread the blame, and the guilt. We are all guilty. No one is guilty. We would rather watch the PM declaim at Kargil. Or keep tabs on the stock exchange as it copies the heart rate of my favourite athlete at the Olympics — oh yes, the Olympics are here.