School or Godown

Two years back, our dear finance minister had levied a 2% education cess (on the total payable tax). The cess yield (which is more than 1 billion US$) was aimed at boosting the primary education system in India. This cess has now seemingly become a permanent feature of the taxation. It will be more honest on government’s part if they stop calling it cess, and rather make it a part of direct tax.
We all know how (in-) efficiently Indian government utilizes the tax revenues. Almost Zero transparency in the administration, even denies the right to know where (or how) the hard earned money of tax payers goes away. But some recent media reports at least give us a little clue about what the “Education Cess” is going in to. A large portion of this money is being spent on maintaining 32,000 buildings (I think it will be in-appropriate to call these buildings as schools, because there are no students enrolled).

Yes, this is shocking but still real. These findings are a part of recent government survey which covered over 11 lacs schools in 35 states and UT. Almost 2.9% of the schools (covered under survey) had no students (and 75 percent of them had no teachers as well). Forty-eight percent of these zero enrollment schools are at primary level. The zero enrollment is highest in Karnatka (almost 25% of total). Though our government has not done much about primary education (which is reflected by the results of survey), I am happy that at least they took the courage of making this survey public.