Families in India have to spend more on their children’s primary school education, making the fundamental right to basic education a distant dream for the Indian poor, according to a recent UNESCO report.

In contrast, university education — which typically helps students who are better-off — remains subsidised and costs just the half of the amount spent on primary school education.

“Households pay for more than one quarter, 28 per cent, of the costs to send their children to primary and secondary school. These fees pose a barrier for the children of poor families,” the report Global Education Digest 2007, released by UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), said.

“Yet, at the same time, households assume just 14 per cent of the costs for university education, which typically benefits students who are better-off,” it added.

Mapping latest education statistics from primary to tertiary levels in more than 200 countries, the reports focuses on the financing of education and provides a series of indicators to compare spending patterns across countries and levels of education.

The report stressed the need to monitor the balance between public and private expenditure.
“Systems that are overly reliant on private contributions, especially at the primary level of education, raise the risk of excluding students from poorer families,” it warns.

Noting that in some countries, the main flow of funding for primary and secondary education comes directly from the government, the report says there are exceptions like India, where “a substantial share” of the public education budget is channelled to private institutions. “In India, it is the result of a system by which the government contracts private schools to help meet the demand for schools exceeding public systems,” it said.
The UNESCO report adds that the distribution of funds was “extremely uneven” between the primary and higher levels of education.

“In India, this is largely because of low participation rates at the higher levels of education. A majority of children do have access to low-cost primary education but are largely excluded from higher levels of education where greater resources per student are invested,” it said. “Equity issues are clearly at play given this uneven distribution of resources,” it added.

Internationally, US emerged as the single greatest investor in education, with its public education budget close to the combined budget of all governments in the six regions — the Arab States, Central and Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, South and West Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Governments in sub-Saharan Africa spend only 2.4 per cent of the world’s public education resources. Yet, about 15 per cent of the school-age population lives in these countries, the report stated.