It took the Telangana Chief Minister’s grandson and the son of Information Technology (IT), Industries and Municipal Administration minister to expose the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) government’s criminal neglect of education in the state. Like the innocent kid in Danish author Hans Christian Andersen’s literary folktale ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, who exclaims “The Emperor has no clothes”, the CM’s grandson has inadvertently exposed his father’s and grandfather’s government. Talking about his visit to a government school, he spoke about how his eyes welled with tears looking at the abject state of infrastructure, or the absence of it, in the school.
Unfortunately for the state’s children and their parents, the school the CM’s grandson visited was not an exception but emblematic of government schools in the state. Most government schools in Telangana are understaffed and lack basic amenities like toilets for girl students. If a school does have toilets, they lack maintenance and become unusable in no time. Schools do not receive textbooks and uniforms in sufficient numbers; even those they receive come weeks or months after the academic year begins.
Only a couple of days back, more than 50,000 mid-day meal workers went on strike, demanding the release of pending payments and the hiked honorarium from Rs 1,000 to Rs 3,000 a month that the government had already ordered for them. More than 23 lakh students in Telangana had to bring their own lunch to school. The payments to the workers were not only pending for months; what’s even more appalling is that the costs for providing meals were pending for months. For a Chief Minister who claimed to be providing students in government schools the same quality of food that his grandson takes, the meagre amount his government pays to the mid-day meal workers for preparing meals is shocking. Along with 100-150 grams of rice, the government pays five rupees forty-five paise (Rs. 5.45) per child studying in primary grade and eight rupees seventeen paise (Rs. 8.17) for those in higher classes. Of these amounts, the Central government pays the major portion. For example, the central government pays three rupees twenty-seven paise (Rs. 3.27), while the state pays two rupees eighteen paise (Rs. 2.18) for each primary school-going kid’s mid-day meal.
Higher education institutions in the state also face a similar scenario. Students from IIIT Basara had to resort to multiple agitations before the government agreed to fulfil their demands – those the Education Minister had termed ‘silly demands’ – for basic amenities. The neglect of Osmania and Kakatiya Universities, the hotbeds of separate Telangana state agitations, is even more glaring.
One doesn’t have to look too far to find the root cause for this sad state of public education in the state. A quick look at the budgetary allocations since the BRS government came to power in 2014 will reveal the cause. While the budgetary allocation for education in the 2014-15 budget was 10.89%, the state has seen education’s share in the budget decline yearly – finally reaching only 6.57% in the budget for 2023-24. On top of the declining allocations, the government has never really spent the total amount it had allocated for education in any of these budgets. Lack of funds is the main reason the Telangana public schools face a shortage of teaching, non-teaching, and supervisory staff.
This fund crunch for education contrasts with the rapidly growing revenues for the state. The Modi government had increased the states’ share of the Center’s taxes from 32% to 42% (now 41% after Jammu and Kashmir ceased to be a state). Adopting the Goods and Services Tax (GST) reduced leakages and increased tax buoyancy. The revenues from liquor have quadrupled since 2014, taking it from around Rs 10,000 crore to Rs 40,000 crore this year. Telangana and Andhra Pradesh collect the highest Value Added Tax (VAT) on petrol and diesel in the country. On top of all these increased revenues, the state has raised huge debt, which stands at more than five lakh crores today. Yet, the spending on education by the state has not seen any growth when adjusted for inflation.
The utter disregard the BRS government shows for core governance responsibilities is astonishing. The BRS government’s performance on core governance issues has been pathetic – be it koodu, goodu, vidya, vaidyam or bhadratha (food, housing, education, health, or law & order). The number of two-bedroom houses built and distributed, the number of new ration cards issued, the number of teachers and doctors recruited, and the number of POCSO cases registered since this government came to power in 2014 will tell that story. With his “maximum politics, minimum governance” model, the Chief Minister seems to have successfully decoupled electoral politics from performance on basic governance. Nowhere in public discussions are the core governance issues given priority. It is up to the state’s voters to bring “governance” back into focus and save Telangana and its education sector.
(The author is BJP TS spokesperson)
