Estimation Of Additional Resource Requirement For Financing Human Development

Abstract

It is widely acknowledged that the underutilisation of public resources in India has often been a major hurdle in the effective provisioning of better quality public services, such as health and education. While both institutional as well as political factors contribute to the underutilisation of public funds, the budgetary allocations for such services are also fairly low as compared to the corresponding allocations in some similar types of economies. Thus, the resources in flow for public services always fall far short of their actual requirements. The present paper attempts to estimate the additional requirements of government resources for education and health sectors for Meghalaya and West Bengal. The total resource requirements are estimated with respect to national norms and standards as prescribed under respective acts/frameworks to provide universal education and health. The additional resource requirements are computed as the difference of these estimated total requirements from the actual government expenditures incurred on these two services.

Key Words: Resource, Requirement, Financing, Human Development.