States grossly underutilising funds despite demand for increased allocation

Updated on: Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Several surveys have shown a decline in the standards of school education across the country; now it turns out many states, including Tamil Nadu, have been grossly underutilising funds despite a demand for increasing allocation for education to 6% of GDP.

The recent report by the Centre for Policy Research's Accountability Initiative has found that Tamil Nadu spent only 1% of the fund meant for learning enhancement programme, which includes activity-based learning in schools. The national average is 14%. The Centre has increased the allocation for implementation of projects under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, the flagship scheme for elementary education, nearly three fold in five years, but spent not more than 61% of it in the last fiscal year.

Utilisation by Tamil Nadu has been steadily slipping, from 80% in 2010 to about 62% last year, while the allocation increased by more than 2.5 times in five years. The state used only 22% of funds for teacher salaries, though it spent 71% on infrastructure. It spent 14% of the innovation fund, lesser than the national average at 23%.

The rate of underutilisation of funds increased after the Centre decided to increase the allocation to meet funding for projects under the RTE Act. Even as the Centre increased the total allocation from 27,552 crore in 2009 to 45,676 crore the next year, the spending rate dropped from 77% in 2009 to 69.93% and 61.24% in 2011-12.

Senior research and programme analyst Avani Kapur, who prepared the report, said there could be many reasons. "Funds may not have been released by the government, or not released on time, projects like civil works take time from sanctioning to actual construction ," she said. "In one state, no civil work was taken up because there were no junior engineers at the block level," she said. Another reason could be the slow rate at which states recruit teachers. "As a result, while funds do get spent, they may not be spent in the same financial year," Kapur said.

SSA special project director in the state A Mohammed Aslam said, "The spending has come down because the Centre has not released some funds. Subsequently the state has not released it." As much as 65% of the funds allocated to SSA come from the Centre, with the remaining 35% put in by the state. Aslam said that last year the Centre did not release up to 400 crore.

States grossly underutilising funds despite demand for increased allocation

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