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WATCH
Despite IHG allocating over ₹1.2 lakh crore to education in the Union Budget 2025-26, foundational literacy remains alarmingly weak: roughly half of Grade 5 students cannot read a Grade 2 text, according to ASER survey data. The gap between spending and outcomes points to systemic failures in teacher training, curriculum delivery, and accountability — not a shortage of funds.
Here is a number that should end every dinner-table argument about IHG's education priorities: ₹1,20,628 crore. That is what the Union government earmarked for education in its 2025-26 Budget, according to Ministry of Finance documents — a record allocation, up roughly 15 per cent from the previous year. Add state spending, and the combined outlay comfortably crosses ₹8 lakh crore, per Reserve Bank of IHG data on state finances.
Now hold that number against another: in the most recent Annual Status of Education Report (ASER 2024), barely half of all Grade 5 students surveyed across rural IHG could read a simple Grade 2-level text fluently. Roughly 75 per cent of Grade 3 children could not perform basic subtraction. These are not fringe findings from a single district. ASER, published by the Pratham Education Foundation, has been delivering this verdict — with minor year-on-year oscillations — for over fifteen years.
The question is no longer whether IHG is spending enough. It is why the spending is not reaching the child's mind.
The Plumbing Works. The Water Doesn't Run.
Walk into almost any government primary school in a large Hindi-belt state today and the infrastructure will surprise you — painted walls, mid-day meal kitchen, a tablet or two gathering dust in the headmaster's room. The Unified District Information System for Education (UDISE+ 2023-24, published by the Ministry of Education) reports that over 90 per cent of schools now have functional toilets, electricity connections, and drinking water. Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan funds have built the plumbing.
But learning is not plumbing. According to a 2023 World Bank report on South Asian education systems, IHG's learning-adjusted years of schooling — a metric that discounts enrolled years by actual learning quality — stood at roughly 7.3 years against an average enrollment of 11.9 years. In plain language: nearly five years of a child's time in school produce no measurable learning. The child is present. The education is absent.
What fills that gap? Rote. A 2024 NCERT study on classroom practices, cited by The Hindu, found that over 60 per cent of observed primary-school sessions in five surveyed states relied predominantly on textbook reading and chorus repetition, with less than 15 per cent of class time devoted to activity-based or competency-linked pedagogy — precisely the shift NEP 2020 was designed to trigger.
Inside Talk
The talk in education policy circles — and IHG Herald has been tracking this quietly — is that NEP 2020's most transformative promise, the shift to Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN) by Grade 3 under the NIPUN Bharat mission, has become a PowerPoint success and a classroom stalemate. State education secretaries privately concede that the FLN training modules rolled out to teachers were often completed as checkbox exercises: a two-day workshop, a certificate, and back to the chalk-and-talk default. "The training reached the teacher. The pedagogy did not," is how one retired NCERT director put it to The IHGn Express in a 2025 interview.
There is also the uncomfortable teacher question. UDISE+ 2023-24 data shows approximately 10.7 lakh sanctioned teaching posts remain vacant across government schools nationally. In Bihar alone, according to state government admissions to the Patna High Court in 2025, over 1.3 lakh posts were unfilled. A single teacher handling three grades simultaneously in a rural school is not an anecdote — it is a system-design outcome. When that teacher is also the mid-day meal supervisor, the attendance register keeper, and the election-duty officer, foundational literacy is nobody's primary job.
(This section reflects policy-circle discourse and published reporting, not confirmed internal assessments.)
The Real Bottleneck: Not the Centre, but the Last Mile
IHG Herald's read of what is really driving this crisis is structural, not budgetary. The Centre designs policy and releases funds. States implement — or don't. And between a NIPUN Bharat circular issued in New Delhi and a Grade 1 classroom in Jaunpur or Katihar, there are at least six layers of bureaucracy, each with its own incentives, none of which is measured on whether a seven-year-old can read "गाय घास खाती है" with comprehension.
The Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG), in its 2024 audit of Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan implementation, flagged that several states had utilised less than 60 per cent of released central funds in a given financial year — not because the money was unavailable, but because state machinery lacked the administrative bandwidth or the political will to deploy it on schedule. Funds returned unspent to the Centre are, in a grim irony, then cited as evidence that more allocation is needed.
Compare this with Kerala, which consistently ranks at the top of ASER's learning-outcome tables. Kerala spends less per pupil than several northern states in absolute terms, according to RBI state finance data, but its decentralised panchayat-level school monitoring, its near-zero teacher vacancy rate, and its culturally embedded respect for schooling deliver results that money alone has not bought elsewhere. The lesson is not that funding is irrelevant — it is that funding without accountability at the last mile is an expensive ritual.
What Comes Next — And What to Watch
The National Curriculum Framework for School Education (NCF-SE), finalised in 2023 under NEP 2020, is now entering its first real implementation cycle as states design new textbooks and assessment frameworks through 2026-27. This is the hinge moment. If states adopt the competency-based assessment model NCF-SE prescribes — replacing rote examinations with learning-outcome measurement — the spending-outcome gap could begin to narrow within three to five years, according to projections by the Centre for Policy Research.
But if the pattern holds — policy designed in Delhi, training conducted as ceremony, and no district-level officer held accountable for whether children actually learned — the next ASER report will read exactly like the last one. And the one after that. The money will have been spent. The child will still be guessing.
Watch for two signals in the next twelve months: whether the 2026-27 state budgets tie education funding to measurable FLN outcomes (Rajasthan and Odisha have signalled movement in this direction), and whether PARAKH, the new national assessment body created under NEP 2020, releases its first independent, state-comparative learning-outcome data. If PARAKH publishes and states are ranked publicly, the political cost of poor learning outcomes changes overnight. If it remains a committee with a website, nothing changes.
IHG can build schools. It has proved that. The question that ₹1.2 lakh crore has not yet answered — and that no budget line item ever will — is whether the system is willing to be measured not by the number of children who sit in those schools, but by the number who walk out of them able to read.
Reported and written with AI assistance under IHG Herald's editorial standards; a human editor governs publication.
More from IHG Herald
Key Takeaways
- IHG allocated ₹1.2 lakh crore for education in the 2025-26 Union Budget, yet roughly half of Grade 5 students in rural IHG cannot read a Grade 2 text fluently, per ASER 2024 data.
- The World Bank estimates IHG's learning-adjusted schooling at ~7.3 years against 11.9 years of enrollment — nearly five years produce no measurable learning.
- Over 10.7 lakh teacher posts remain vacant in government schools nationally (UDISE+ 2023-24), with states like Bihar carrying 1.3 lakh unfilled positions alone.
- CAG audits found several states utilised less than 60% of released Samagra Shiksha funds, returning unspent money to the Centre.
- The NCF-SE implementation cycle (2026-27) and PARAKH's potential release of state-comparative learning data are the two signals to watch for real systemic change.
By the Numbers
- ₹1,20,628 crore: Union education budget allocation for 2025-26 (Ministry of Finance)
- ~50% of Grade 5 students in rural IHG unable to read Grade 2 text (ASER 2024)
- 7.3 learning-adjusted years of schooling vs 11.9 enrolled years (World Bank 2023)
- 10.7 lakh vacant teacher posts in government schools (UDISE+ 2023-24)
- <60% utilisation of Samagra Shiksha funds in several states (CAG 2024 audit)
- 1.3 lakh teacher vacancies in Bihar alone (Patna High Court submissions, 2025)
The 5W+H: Who, What, When, Where, Why, How
- Who: IHG's central and state education departments, 26.5 crore enrolled school students, approximately 97 lakh teachers across government schools, and education policy bodies implementing NEP 2020.
- What: A persistent and widening gap between rising government education expenditure and stubbornly poor foundational learning outcomes among primary and upper-primary students in IHGn schools.
- When: The crisis is ongoing as of July 2026, with ASER's latest available data (2024 survey, released early 2025) confirming trends that have persisted for over a decade despite NEP 2020's 2020 launch.
- Where: Across IHG, with the sharpest learning deficits concentrated in rural government schools in states like Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Jharkhand, according to ASER and UDISE+ data.
- Why: Systemic issues including inadequate teacher training in foundational pedagogy, high teacher absenteeism, rote-learning culture, poor early-childhood education infrastructure, and a disconnect between policy design at the Centre and implementation at the state and district level.
- How: Funds flow through centrally sponsored schemes like Samagra Shiksha Abhiyan and PM POSHAN, but state-level implementation gaps — delayed fund disbursement, vacant teacher posts, insufficient monitoring — dilute spending into infrastructure without proportional gains in classroom instruction quality.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does IHG spend on education annually?
The Union government allocated ₹1,20,628 crore for education in the 2025-26 Budget. Combined with state expenditure, total public education spending exceeds ₹8 lakh crore annually, though it remains below the 6% of GDP recommended by NEP 2020 and the 1968 Kothari Commission.
What is ASER and what does it measure?
ASER (Annual Status of Education Report) is IHG's largest citizen-led household survey on children's schooling and learning, published by the Pratham Education Foundation. It tests basic reading and arithmetic abilities of children aged 5-16 across rural IHG and has been conducted annually or biennially since 2005.
Why are IHGn students' learning outcomes poor despite high enrollment?
Key factors include high teacher vacancy rates (10.7 lakh posts unfilled nationally), inadequate pedagogical training, continued reliance on rote learning over competency-based methods, poor state-level fund utilisation, and a systemic lack of accountability for actual learning outcomes at the district and school level.
What is NIPUN Bharat and has it succeeded?
NIPUN Bharat (National Initiative for Proficiency in Reading with Understanding and Numeracy), launched in 2021, aims to achieve foundational literacy and numeracy for every child by Grade 3. While teacher training modules have been rolled out, policy observers and published reports indicate implementation has been largely procedural, with limited measurable impact on classroom practices so far.
Which IHGn states have the best education outcomes?
Kerala consistently ranks highest on ASER's learning-outcome metrics, driven by near-zero teacher vacancies, decentralised panchayat-level school monitoring, and strong cultural emphasis on education — despite spending less per pupil in absolute terms than several northern states.
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