Dr Palash Baruah is Associate Fellow at National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER), New Delhi and DL Wankhar is a retired officer of the Government of India. In this piece for The Print, they use publicly available data to highlight the rapid surge – across rural and urban areas – in spending on private coaching classes:
“The National Sample Survey’s Household Consumption Expenditure Survey (2011-12 and 2022-23) provides useful data on education spending by households, including spending on private coaching.
Our analysis of unit-level NSS data revealed that, in 2011-12, households spent Rs 859 per annum on private tuitions or coaching classes out of a total average yearly education expenditure of Rs 7,240. By 2022-23, it rose to an average of Rs 2,321 per annum out of a total average yearly education expenditure of Rs 17,147 per household.
Thus, households (both rural and urban) spent about 13.53 per cent of their annual education expenditure on coaching and tutoring in 2022-23. This is 1.67 percentage points higher than 2011-12 (11.87 per cent), implying an increase in household spending on coaching classes.” [Underlining is ours]
What’s even more remarkable is that during a period in which real rural wages have not risen at all, rural spending on private coaching classes has risen even more sharply than urban spending. Messrs Baruah & Wankhar write: “…we found during our research that rural households are more burdened as compared to urban households.
Our analysis of NSS data corroborates this. During 2011-12, urban households on average spent about 12.51 per cent per annum on private coaching out of their total education budget. This marginally declined to 12.02 per cent in 2022-23.
On the other hand, there was an upward climb in the average yearly expenditure by rural households on coaching classes and home tuition. According to our calculations, rural households on average spent 10.90 per cent on private tuition/coaching out of their yearly spending on education in 2011-12, which surged to 15.32 per cent in 2022-23.”
So what’s going on? Why is this happening? “It is often found that a larger number of students from rural households often attend costly private tuitions. They do this to compensate for the deficiencies and shortcomings that result from attending publicly funded low-cost schools or colleges. Not only this, in so far as coaching is concerned, there is a shortage of such centres in rural area.
The increasing competitiveness of entrance exams has dragged students from rural areas to urban centres for the purpose of coaching. This poses an additional burden on the rural households.”
Leaving aside the surge in spending on private coaching classes in rural India, there is another intriguing dimension in how spending on coaching is rising – the states seeing the biggest surge in spending on private coaching are some of India’s poorest states: “We also found that rural households, which were spending more than 10 per cent of their education budget on private tuition/coaching in 2011-12, saw their expenditure increase further in 2022-23.
These states included Jammu & Kashmir, Lakshadweep, Jharkhand, Odisha, Bihar, West Bengal and Tripura. It is quite intriguing to note that in states like West Bengal and Tripura, the share of rural households’ average yearly expenditure on private tuition/coaching is more than half of what they spend on their overall yearly education expenditure.
According to our research and calculations, it increased further to more than 66 per cent in 2022-23 in these two states. Even in states like Odisha and Bihar, the share of average rural households spending on coaching has crossed the 40 per cent mark in 2022-23.”
Our take on what Messrs Baruah & Wankhar are highlighting points to a triple failure on the part of the Indian state: (1) the state fails to provide education & skilling to students; (2) the state fails to enforce ‘Section 28 of the Right of Children to Free & Compulsory Education Act, 2009 which prohibits private tuition by teachers,’ and (3) these state failures are more profound in India’s poorest states.
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