Budgetary allocation on education inadeqaute

Finance Minister AMA Muhith placed the 2014-15 fiscal budget in parliament on Thursday last.  Education is undoubtedly a major driving force of development in any country. There lies a direct relationship between education and poverty alleviation. Also it has close links with health and hygiene and all other sectors which call for raising consciousness of human beings.
Mr Muhith said in his budget speech, "Steps will be taken to enhance cooperation and coordination among all the government and private vocational and technical institutions. The ongoing construction work of technical schools in each upazila will be completed soon. Besides, vocational training courses will be introduced at secondary and higher secondary levels."
The minister claimed that at present the country sees almost 100 per cent enrolment at the primary level. Actually the figure raises questions as several researches show the figure stands far below than the government claims. The government needs to give the nation the real picture. Otherwise, real progress cannot be achieved on the basis of distorted picture.
It is true the government has increased budgetary allocations in the education sector over the years attaching top priority to it. The allocation made for the next fiscal year is still far behind the expected level. In terms of percentage of GDP (gross domestic product), Bangladesh spends 2.2 per cent for education which has remained almost static for the last several years. The UNESCO declaration says that the allocation for education should be at least 20 per cent of the national budget and 6.0 per cent of the GDP. It clearly shows we lag far behind this global standard of allocation. For education, the Maldives spends around 8.5 per cent, Vietnam around 6.6 per cent and Nepal over 4.7 per cent and India 3.0 per cent of their GDP. Our position clearly shows where we are in this race.
The education sector has been allocated Tk 292.13 billion in the fiscal year 2014-15, which is 11.66 per cent of the total budget and 10.96 per cent more than the revised budget of the outgoing fiscal year.
An allocation of Tk 136.73 billion was set for the primary and mass education ministry and the rest for the education ministry. The percentage of total allocation, however, does not match the figure of five years ago. In the revised budget for the 2009-10 fiscal year, the figure was 14.3 per cent. In the revised budget for 2010-11 the percentage was 14 which slid to 11.4 per cent in 2012. In the 2012-13 fiscal year, the percentage stood at 11.1 per cent.
Mr Muhith said under this budget, the poor students will be given assistance and headhunting will be initiated  to evaluate creative skills of students and  stipend will be given up to the graduation level students. Giving stipend to graduate-level students does not appear to be a sound decision. Usually our graduates remain unemployed as they don't have any technical skills to secure jobs. If we give them stipends, we will encourage producing more educated unemployed people.
Giving free books to all the students irrespective of urban and rural areas, poor and rich students and accessible and inaccessible areas should be given a second thought. Only the poor students and those who live in vulnerable areas should be given free books.
  As many as 37,672 posts have been created to recruit additional teachers at the primary level and the minister also has appealed to the private sector to come forward and invest not only in providing stipends, but also in building school infrastructure and improving the conditions of teachers.  
It is good the government has realised that the political interference has seriously downgraded our education which the minister has vowed to remove. He said, 'We will exert our highest efforts to make school and college management system more democratic, participatory, accountable, transparent and free from partisan interest. The system of forming committees in schools and colleges will be changed to free the intuitions from political interferences and corruption.'
Finally, there must be clear guidelines for improving quality of education. We are producing thousands of medical graduates every year through our public and private medical colleges but fail to produce quality doctors. We spend a lot of our national money every year for treatment outside the country. We must think of this issue also very seriously.
The writer is Programme Manager: BRAC Education Programme and Vice-President, Bangladesh English Language Teachers Association (BELTA).                     [email protected]