ABSTRACT
India’s drive towards achieving universal elementary education has picked up pace after the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) came into force in 2001. It is financed through a national ‘education cess’ levied on all federal taxes and supplemented by budgetary allocations, both by the centre as well as the states. Before SSA came into existence, elementary education was mainly in the domain of states. Budgetary allocations varied from state to state depending on fiscal capacity, teacher recruitment policy and importance attached to social sectors such as education in overall state government policy. This was manifested in wide variations in enrolment, attendance and completion rates across states. Lack of access to and poor quality of school infrastructure was an important factor in poor outputs and outcomes (PROBE Team 1999; Dreze and Kingdon 2001). Coupled with differences in administrative efficiency, reflected in teacher absenteeism, India was some distance away from achieving Millenium Development Goals (MDG) on universal primary education (Kremer et al. 2005).
