36 SOCIAL SCIENTIST education a little more than 4 per cent, and university education less than 1 per cent. But even this reduced weightage to primary education was further reduced persistently during the next three Plans and three annual Plans. Fourth Plan estimates provide for only 28.5 per cent on primary education, 14.4 per cent on secondary education and 22.3 per cent on university education. Secondary and university education are, of course, more expensive than primary education. Therefore, allocation of higher expenditure per student on specialised or higher stages of education cannot, as a rule, be objected to. But in a society like ours, with wide income disparities between sections of rural and urban population, greater state patronage to secondary and university education, particularly the latter, necessarily means greater state patronage to middle or high income groups^ and more so, to the urban groups, as the largest number of our secondary schools are still located in urban or semi-urban areas, and almost all our colleges and universities are in towns or cities. For about 80 per cent of the country's population living in the rural areas, the facilities for primary education were mostly inaccessible and it is this section which accounts for about 60 per cent drop-out at the primary level. This gross negligence of primary education is a form of exploitation and this exploitation of the educational system is a part of the capitalist path of development of our economy. This has been frankly admitted by many official spokesmen who talk of 'social justice9 in education po^cy. Regional disparity, yet another form of exploitation, is evident at various levels. Poor states suffer from more acute paucity of resources. Since education is a state subject, rate of literacy gets connected with the relative poverty or otherwise oT tne states. Rate of expansion of primary education (or other stages of education) is automatically much lower in poor states. Student-teacher ratio is worse in these states because of a lower rate of per student expenditure on education, with the result that poorer states generally have poorer academic standards. Thus an inbuilt 'self-perpetuating process of exploitation continues, both at the general economic level and at the level of education. In order to provide a smoke-screen for the utter failure of their educational planning which, as in the industrial sector, resulted in interstate and intra-state^ imbalances^ the Central Government have late been working for the inclusion of education in the Central or Concurrent list (which today is another name for Central subject). This is a part of their calculated move to centralise all powers and to abrogate to themselves functions which are at present allotted to the states under the Indian Constitution.2 As a means of employment, education has been more or less irrelevant. On top of this, education as related to man-power requirements of the economy has never been planned except in very few cases of professional education and capitalism at its decaying stage will never be in a position to accomodate man-power planning. For example, the Education