India set its own targets. It has never met them.
Not an opinion — the government’s own numbers, against the government’s own goals. Public spending on education is meant to reach 6% of GDP, a figure first set in 1968 and restated in 1986, 1992 and again in 2020. It stands at 2.5%. And the posts that are funded often have nobody in them.
Distance to the targets the government set for itself
Every target below is quoted from a policy document, with its clause. That is deliberate: the yardstick is never ours, so disagreeing with this section means disagreeing with the National Education Policy.
Public spending on education
Target set by the government itself · National Education Policy 2020, paragraph 26.2
“The Centre and the States will work together to increase the public investment in Education sector to reach 6% of GDP at the earliest.”National Education Policy 2020, paragraph 26.2
No deadline was set. The Policy says 'at the earliest' and sets no year. Paragraph 26.1 records that the same 6% figure was envisaged by the 1968 Policy, reiterated in 1986 and reaffirmed in the 1992 review — so this target is 58 years old and has never been met.
Closing that gap would cost about ₹13,80,276 croresrc a year — 13.80 lakh crore, or roughly 2,108× the entire central government advertising budget.
Which measure? There is more than one official definition of this spending, and they differ by nearly a factor of two. On the Ministry of Education, Analysis of Budgeted Expenditure — a broader definition that counts education spending by departments other than the education departments the figure was 4.43% in 2017-18, which puts the gap at 1.57 pp rather than 3.5 — about ₹6,19,153 crore a year. Both are shown because picking the larger one silently would be the easiest way to make this page untrustworthy.
The share of GDP is a 2023-24 figure (Union 0.3% + States 2.2%); the rupee amount applies that gap to 2026-27 GDP, so it answers “what would this cost now” rather than “what was it worth then”.
Government spending on health
Target set by the government itself · National Health Policy 2017
“Raise public health expenditure progressively to 2.5% of GDP by 2025.”National Health Policy 2017
Deadline: 2025. This target had a date on it, and the date has passed. 2025 is behind us and combined public health spending is at 1.0% of GDP.
Closing that gap would cost about ₹5,91,547 croresrc a year — 5.92 lakh crore, or roughly 903× the entire central government advertising budget.
The share of GDP is a 2023-24 figure (Union 0.1% + States 0.9%); the rupee amount applies that gap to 2026-27 GDP, so it answers “what would this cost now” rather than “what was it worth then”.
It is not drifting towards the target. It is drifting away.
A single year can be explained away. This is every year the 16th Finance Commission published, from one table, on one definition — so the line means the same thing at both ends.
Over 13 years, states’ education spending went from 2.4% to 2.2% of GDP — down 0.2 percentage points. The target line has not moved in 58 years.
States only, from a single table so the years are comparable. The Union adds roughly 0.3 pp on top — that figure is published for 2023-24 only, so it is not drawn as a second line here rather than being carried backwards as an assumption. The 6% target is for combined Union and State spending.
Over 13 years, states’ health spending went from 0.6% to 0.9% of GDP — up 0.3 percentage points. The target line has not moved in that time.
States only, from a single table so the years are comparable. The Union adds roughly 0.1 pp on top — that figure is published for 2023-24 only, so it is not drawn as a second line here rather than being carried backwards as an assumption. The 2.5% target is for combined Union and State spending.
This is share of GDP, not rupees, because it is the cleanest way to show the gap to a target that does not move with inflation. For the actual rupee figures by ministry, over the same stretch of years, see below.
What the government actually spent, ministry by ministry
Reconstructed from fourteen years of budget documents — the Union Budget’s own Expenditure Budget for 2012-15, and PRS Legislative Research’s annual Union Budget Analysis from 2017-18 onward. Every figure is that year’s actuals where a government has closed its books, and the latest published estimate where it has not.
Defence
₹2.53 lakh crore → ₹7.85 lakh crore (3.1×)
2012-13–2025-26 2.89× nominal, 1.80× in constant rupees
Education
₹66.05 thousand crore → ₹1.39 lakh crore (2.1×)
2012-13–2025-26 1.85× nominal, 1.15× in constant rupees
Health & Family Welfare
₹25.13 thousand crore → ₹1.07 lakh crore (4.2×)
2012-13–2025-26 3.85× nominal, 2.40× in constant rupees
Home Affairs
₹47.78 thousand crore → ₹2.55 lakh crore (5.3×)
2012-13–2025-26 5.05× nominal, 3.15× in constant rupees
Road Transport & Highways
₹20.19 thousand crore → ₹3.10 lakh crore (15.4×)
2012-13–2025-26 14.22× nominal, 8.87× in constant rupees
Rural Development
₹50.19 thousand crore → ₹1.97 lakh crore (3.9×)
2012-13–2025-26 3.76× nominal, 2.35× in constant rupees
Nominal ₹ crore, as printed in the budget documents The same money in constant 2025-26 rupees
The gap between the two lines is inflation, not policy. Prices rose 1.60× between 2012-13 and 2025-26, so a budget line that merely kept pace looks on a nominal chart like strong growth. Constant-rupee figures use the GDP deflator, which measures prices across the whole economy’s output — the right basis for government spending. On a consumer price basis the same period is 1.95×, which would make every real line fall further; this site publishes the more conservative of the two. 2026-27 is a Budget Estimate with no published price index yet, so the constant-rupee line stops a year short rather than being extrapolated. The finely dotted marker is 2014-15, when scheme money was reclassified out of ministry demands into Central Assistance to State Plans. The ministry table for that year therefore measures something narrower than the years either side — Rural Development reads ₹5,452 crore against ₹58,666 crore the year before, with ₹61,801 crore moved out — so it is left out of the lines rather than plotted as a cut that never happened. The figures are still in the data and the open API. The dashed marker is 2017-18: the Plan/Non-Plan classification was abolished and the Railway Budget was merged into the Union Budget that year, so figures either side of it are not perfectly comparable, most visibly for ministries whose budgeting method changed. No ministry-wise breakdown could be reached for 2015-16, 2016-17 — both years’ source documents turned out to carry economic aggregates only, confirmed by reading them directly. Those years are gaps in the lines above, not estimates.
The post exists. The money was voted. Nobody was hired.
Underspending can always be answered with “there is no money”. A vacancy cannot: the post was created and the salary was budgeted. Across 51,96,597 sanctioned elementary teaching posts, 11,97,893 were unfilled — 23.1%.
Elementary school teachers
Ministry of Education · as on 31 March 2020 (2019-20)
How old this is. The most recent state-wise figures the Ministry of Education has released in machine-readable form are for 2019-20, tabled in a Rajya Sabha reply in 2023. Treat this as the last published position, not as today’s.
Worst by rate: Uttar Pradesh 54.6%, Jharkhand 39.2%, Bihar 35.9%, Andhra Pradesh 30.8%, Rajasthan 27.1%. Ranked by share of funded posts, not by count — ranking by count would only re-rank the states by population.
| State | Sanctioned | In position | Vacant | Vacant % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Uttar Pradesh | 8,79,691 | 3,99,148 | 4,80,543 | 54.6% |
| Jharkhand | 1,91,679 | 1,16,569 | 75,110 | 39.2% |
| Bihar | 5,92,541 | 3,79,735 | 2,12,806 | 35.9% |
| Andhra Pradesh | 1,48,785 | 1,03,025 | 45,760 | 30.8% |
| Rajasthan | 3,14,271 | 2,29,236 | 85,035 | 27.1% |
| Chhattisgarh | 1,96,806 | 1,47,091 | 49,715 | 25.3% |
| Madhya Pradesh | 3,63,099 | 2,88,744 | 74,355 | 20.5% |
| Uttarakhand | 46,053 | 39,048 | 7,005 | 15.2% |
| Telangana | 1,06,730 | 91,359 | 15,371 | 14.4% |
| West Bengal | 4,54,860 | 3,93,794 | 61,066 | 13.4% |
| Tripura | 35,091 | 30,655 | 4,436 | 12.6% |
| Assam | 1,82,439 | 1,59,587 | 22,852 | 12.5% |
| Maharashtra | 3,24,801 | 3,01,238 | 23,563 | 7.3% |
| Karnataka | 2,03,824 | 1,91,451 | 12,373 | 6.1% |
| Meghalaya | 22,632 | 21,756 | 876 | 3.9% |
| Haryana | 65,446 | 63,928 | 1,518 | 2.3% |
| Manipur | 16,167 | 15,821 | 346 | 2.1% |
| Gujarat | 2,17,106 | 2,13,067 | 4,039 | 1.9% |
| Nagaland | 17,330 | 17,013 | 317 | 1.8% |
| Tamil Nadu | 1,47,913 | 1,45,551 | 2,362 | 1.6% |
| Mizoram | 2,228 | 2,193 | 35 | 1.6% |
| Arunachal Pradesh | 14,245 | 14,059 | 186 | 1.3% |
| Kerala | 1,26,382 | 1,25,011 | 1,371 | 1.1% |
| Goa | 2,216 | 2,216 | 0 | 0.0% |
| Himachal Pradesh | 45,997 | 45,997 | 0 | 0.0% |
| Odisha | 2,29,006 | 2,29,006 | 0 | 0.0% |
| Punjab | 75,805 | 75,805 | 0 | 0.0% |
| Sikkim | 8,573 | 8,573 | 0 | 0.0% |
Union Territories are listed by the source but excluded from this table and from the per-state ranking: they are outside the 28 states the Finance Commission devolves to, which is the list every other page here uses. They are still inside the national totals above.
Allocate the movable half
The top 13 ministries account for 54.5% of what the Union spends — ₹29,13,714 croresrc. That is your budget. The rest is shown first, because you cannot touch it, and that is the lesson.
Balanced against the government’s own pool of 29.14 lakh crore. Move a slider to write your own budget.
You have not moved anything yet. Change a ministry above and your budget will appear here, next to what the government actually did.
“Don’t spend my tax on that”
Anger about public spending tends to land on government advertising. It is ₹654.9 croresrc — 0.0122% of the budget, or 1.22 paise per person per day. It is worth knowing, and it is not the problem: the education gap above is about 2,108× larger. This section is here so the number can be checked, not so it can be resented.
Tick the ones you would stop paying for, and see what each is actually worth — and who it reaches. No adjectives, just the line item and the arithmetic.
Tick anything you would stop paying for. The arithmetic answers back.
The crowd’s budget
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The ledger
| Particulars | ₹ crore | Share | Per person / day |
|---|---|---|---|
| Defence | 7,84,678 | 14.7% | ₹14.57 |
| Road Transport and Highways | 3,09,875 | 5.8% | ₹5.75 |
| Railways | 2,81,377 | 5.3% | ₹5.22 |
| Home Affairs | 2,55,234 | 4.8% | ₹4.74 |
| Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution | 2,39,521 | 4.5% | ₹4.45 |
| Rural Development | 1,97,023 | 3.7% | ₹3.66 |
| Chemicals and Fertilisers | 1,77,061 | 3.3% | ₹3.29 |
| Agriculture and Farmers' Welfare | 1,40,529 | 2.6% | ₹2.61 |
| Education | 1,39,289 | 2.6% | ₹2.59 |
| Health and Family Welfare | 1,06,530 | 2.0% | ₹1.98 |
| Communications | 1,02,267 | 1.9% | ₹1.90 |
| Jal Shakti | 94,808 | 1.8% | ₹1.76 |
| Housing and Urban Affairs | 85,522 | 1.6% | ₹1.59 |
| All other ministries, interest, pensions, establishment and transfers | 24,33,601 | 45.5% | ₹45.18 |
| Total expenditure | 53,47,315 | 100.0% | ₹99.28 |
Ministry classification. Never summed against the economic classification — defence salaries appear in both cuts, and adding them overstates the budget. Of the committed half, interest payments alone are 14.04 lakh crore (26.3%), an economic classification rather than a ministry. Per-person figures use the 2026 population (projected; the observed World Bank series ends at 2024) and are Union spending only — health and education are largely State subjects.