State’s performance in edu access drops, big share of funds unspent

Gurgaon: Haryana has remained stagnant in terms of learning outcomes and quality in school education in the past three years and has, in fact, seen a decline in providing access to school education to kids compared with the pre-Covid year of 2019-20, according to the Samagra Shiksha report released by the ministry of education.
With a score of 134, the state has seen no improvement in the learning outcomes of students of classes 3, 5 and 8 since 2018-19. On the other hand, there has been a decline in the accessibility of education for children. While the score in this category was 78 in 2018-19, it dropped to 75 in 2019-20 and 2020-21. The report was released by the Union education ministry’s Project Approval Board, in which the state scored a total of 865 points in the Performance Grading Index (PGI) and was recognised as a ‘Grade 2’ state in school education.
The decline has been attributed to allocated funds not being used by the school education department. For instance, the state received a total of Rs 427.5 crore for school infrastructure development in 2022-23 under Samagra Shiksha but utilised only Rs 88.8 crore (20%). For IT and digital initiatives, the department had allotted Rs 129.7 crore to the school education board of Haryana, out of which only Rs 49.3 crore (38%) was spent. Of the total allocation of Rs 1,618.6 crore in 2022-23 by the Project Approval Board, the state spent Rs 1,014.2 crore (62.7%).
The state has been asked by the ministry to examine its score in each domain and take measures to improve its overall PGI score. The report stated Haryana still needs to work on providing interventions to improve the learning outcomes of the students. Similarly, for the declined access outcomes, the board said that the state needs to focus on the enrolment rate at the secondary level and take steps for identifying and bringing out-of-school children into the ambit of formal education.
It further said the state has shown the maximum improvement under infrastructure and encouraged it to further take measures to reach the top grade, with specific focus on areas where the performance is low, such as building computer labs at the upper primary level. For equity outcomes, the state has shown some improvement with increase in the gross enrolment ratio of children with special needs and the number of such students receiving aids and appliances.
However, schools having functional toilets for these students is an area of concern, as only 8,045 schools (36%) have toilets friendly for boys with special needs and 4,592 (20%) have toilets for girls with special needs.
A senior official from the education department said, “This is not the first time that the allocated budget has remained unutilised. In 2021-22, just Rs 24.1 crore (8.1%) was spent against the allocated Rs 297.5 crore for infrastructure.”