Education Budget Nothing New, Rather Traditional

Masum Billah :
We witnessed the country’s 52nd annual budget for the fiscal year 2022-23 placed by our Finance Minister Mustafa Kamal on 09 June which amounts to Tk 678,064 crore, up from last year’s budget of Tk 603,681 crore (revised down to Tk 593,500 crore). It is the 14th consecutive budget of this government. As per his speech delivered in parliament, the proposed budget is expected to be 15.2 percent of the GDP.
If we cast our eyes on education budget, we see in the last financial year 11.69 percent of national budget was allocated for education that has become 12.01 in the 2022-2023 fiscal year. We have been moving around 12 per cent of our national budget several years in the past convincing us that this year’s allocation for education does not see any excitement, rather follows the tradition. Even though we continued hearing the stories of doing many things to redress the gap created by the Corona pandemic that ravaged the education sector for two years. In the face of this reality, we have seen just 1.83 percent allocation of our GDP for education. I want to repeat here that the global standard set by UNICEF to allocate 20 percent of national budget and 6 percent of GDP for education of a county has not seen so far in our budget. In terms spending the percentage of GDP and total national budget percentage for education, we stand at the last row in South Asian countries. Even, Nepal is ahead of us in this respect.
It is also true that more 11 thousand 806 crore taka has been allocated for three ministries and divisions of education in 2022-2023 fiscal budget than that of the last year. The secondary and higher education division, madrasa and technical education division and primary and mass education ministry have seen Tk 81 thousand 450 crore which was 69 thousnad 64 crore in the previous fiscal year. The primary and mass education ministry has received Tk 31 thousand 761 against 28 thousand 222 taka in the last fiscal. Secondary and higher education division has got 39thousand 962 crore taka against 32thousand 413 crore taka last year and in the madrasa and technical education division has got the allocation of Tk 9 thosuand 727 crore which is 718 crore more than the previous fiscal year.
The finance minister said that the rate of education in the secondary level, gender equality, general science and technology based learning and training, stipend and scholarship for students and teachers, various works for brining out merit of students, building structure of government and non-government educational institutions, free book distribution are going on as part of government’s plan to spread education and increase its quality. He also mentioned the recruitment of 38 thousand 283 teachers through NTRCA and 15 thousand 163 teachers’ employment are under process. In 2021-2022 twelve thousand classrooms have been built. About 315 schools in 315 upazilas have been turned into model schools. Education Trust Fund of the Prime Minister has got one thousand crore taka to help the poor, deprived and meritorious students that we appreciate but the contribution and functions of model schools seem to have no such effect on quality education. It does not sound to be a well-known initiative in educational arena.
Another picture we notice in the education that the schools which are not still under MPO have been struggling to get MPO and already MPO schools are agitating to get nationalized. This area deserves huge attention of the government as our primary and secondary schools and even colleges are not uniformly distributed across the country as per the density of population and geographical diversity. It has been observed that many government primary schools have only one or two students and many schools see 30-40 students that clearly tells the misuse of money in this sector. Again, the densely populated areas don’t have any secondary schools or colleges. On the other hand, the areas which need schools go without any school that does not talk about sound distribution of educational institutions in different parts of the country. This has been going on for many years that need to be addressed by developing a good mapping. The previous and the current budget also don’t show any such hints that we expected. Because of this anomaly, many teachers think they have been deprived of their dues by the state. On the other hand, the state thinks they have done a lot for the teachers. A serious gap has developed in this field that calls for redressing and the budget could have given an indication of it that we see missing.
Besides, from the year 2023 news textbooks based on new curriculum will be provided to the students of grade one and two and six and seven that will definitely claim a big amount of money but no such talk was heard in the budget session.
In the face of this, we appreciate the stipend that has been increased from Tk 8 crore to Tk 20 crore for poor but meritorious students. Our request in this regard will be to provide it to the deserving students. The size of GDP stands at Tk. 44 lac 49 thousand 959 core but education has got less than two percent of it that cannot be said to be a good amount for education. However, we trump every year that education has seen the highest priority in the budget that seems to be very contradictory.

(Masum Billah is Country Director, Volunteers Association for Bangladeshi and President, English Teachers’ Association of Bangladesh).