Few right-thinking taxpayers can suffer pangs about the 2 per cent across-the-board cess imposed by the finance minister to ensure primary education and midday meal schemes among the poor, ill-fed, illiterate children of the country.
Which honest Indian in any conscience would want to shirk from such a simple act of duty? No one seriously objected when a 1 per cent cess was charged during a contingency such as the Kargil war and no one can object to pay for arguably the biggest on-going contingency in independent India, which should have been fought on a war-footing all these years.
No, it's not the 2 per cent that bothers taxpayers. What worries them and invites cynical comment is how efficiently the sum of Rs 5,000 crore (Rs 50 billion) will be disbursed, without waste or leakages, to the poorest children across the country. It is not raising the money that is the problem in the do-gooders department but its effective, monitored distribution among the targeted beneficiaries.
P Chidambaram has silenced the bleeding hearts with his altruistic gesture, which needs to be applauded. But he has forgotten what his late leader Rajiv Gandhi once said about government subsidies: that only 15 paise out of every rupee reaches the people for whom they are intended. That was back in the 1980s. Government's own surveys reveal that the percentage may have dropped to eight paise out of every rupee in the 1990s.
It is not lack of government funds or schemes to help malnourished children, starving peasants or indebted farmers that ever seem to be in short supply. The real crisis is in distribution and organised planning.
What good are free midday meals to lure children to school when there are no teachers? There were 4,46,000 vacancies for schoolteachers throughout the country last year and only 3.5 per cent were filled.
In Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Bengal -- the three states with the worst record in infrastructure -- teachers' salaries haven't been paid for ages.
Although the government itself claims that there are about 60 lakh children out of the schooling system, the fact is that the dropout rate remains high -- about 40 per cent -- and recent studies show that it may, in fact, be increasing.
In certain districts of Bihar, Champaran for instance, it is as high as 74 per cent and schools are known to exist with neither any children nor teachers! Stories of adulterated or substandard food in schools, rapacious caterers and shady NGOs -- often promoted in tandem by corrupt district-level politicians and petty bureaucrats -- are rampant.
These are the blights that will hit the new 2 per cent levy just as they afflict the existing subsidies. Even in a well-off city like Delhi where school services are open to a comparatively greater degree of public scrutiny, the media is full of stories of the low-quality of midday meals, inadequate in nutrition or hygiene.
The Rs 5,000 crore to be raised via the 2 per cent tax is in addition to the thousands of crore that the human resources development ministry is already billing the finance ministry and foreign donors for its midday school meal and Sarva Shiksha Abhiyaan schemes.
What taxpayers like you and me, indeed any donor Indian or foreign, has a right to demand is accountability for this vast corpus of money.
Where is it going? To finance more committees and task forces and Planning Commission reports in Delhi and, education being a state subject, to fund spurious NGOs and school buildings with children and teachers missing?
What is needed is a series of imaginative alternatives to bridge the divides between the Centre and states, cities and villages, district and panchayat-level administrations. As the Rs 5,000 crore is being raised largely from urban or corporate taxpayers, why not create a more direct interface between them and the functioning of primary schools in specific rural districts?
Why not introduce greater degree of transparency in the disbursement of the education fund by enjoining committed sections of taxpayers to monitor its effective usage? This will effectively dilute the powers of government as the sole decision-making authority in disseminating primary education across the country.
Surely there is room for specialists and sensible citizens to act as whistle-blowers in a delivery system that is riddled with examples of failure?
If panchayats and district administrations have a right to decide and implement basic education and midday meals schemes as they please, then taxpayers also have the right to know how well their money is being spent. Powered by 