RIGHTFULLY OURS

Introduction

Between 2012-13 and 2025-26, India’s Union Budget allocation towards children’s development fell from 4.76% to 2.29% of total expenditure. The government is correct to observe that absolute outlays have grown over this period. However, the proportional share has declined across nearly every intervening budget, even as children continue to constitute nearly 27% of the population. For a demographic of this size, a falling share within an expanding budget reflects a systematic retreat.

The constitutional and international law stakes of this retreat are serious. India ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (“UNCRC”) in 1992, accepting under Article 4 an obligation to deploy the “maximum available resources” for the realisation of children’s rights. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, in its General Comment No. 5, has interpreted this phrase as requiring states to demonstrate progressive mobilisation of available resources and prohibiting retrogressive measures without adequate justification. The decline from 4.76% to 2.29% of total expenditure over thirteen budgets without any adequate justification is facially retrogressive under the UN Committee’s interpretation of Article 4.

Domestically, Article 21A of the Constitution guarantees free and compulsory education, while Articles 39(f) and 45 place children’s healthy development and early care within the Directive Principles of State Policy (“DPSPs”). Since Unnikrishnan J.P. v. State of Andhra Pradesh, the progressive expansion of Article 21 jurisprudence has brought socio-economic entitlements within the scope of enforceable constitutional concern. Under-allocation that produces institutional breakdown, such as understaffed committees, backlogged juvenile courts; and children held in institutional care beyond statutory timelines, attracts constitutional scrutiny.

This blog argues that India’s child finance problem extends beyond inadequate spending. The deeper issue is a structural one: the State treats children’s needs like education, nutrition, health, and protection, as separable administrative problems; each housed in a different ministry with a different budget line and a different measure of success.

This blog proceeds in three parts. Part I examines the allocation skew and its institutional costs. Part II analyses how conditional transfer mechanisms structurally disadvantage poorer states, deepening inter-state inequality in rights realisation. Part III traces the design failure that produces strong inputs alongside weak outcomes and examines why it persists. The blog closes with a three-tiered set of recommendations.

The Allocation Skew: Where the Money Goes, and What It Costs

Over 76% of India’s child-related allocations go to education, according to the HAQ: Centre for Child Rights’ Budget for Children 2024-25 (“BfC”). Whereas, child protection, where the system is legally responsible for trafficking victims, abuse survivors, and children in conflict with the law, only receives 0.04% of the total Union Budget, and 1.57% of the child budget. A commonly raised counterpoint is that education serves roughly 247 million children, while protection serves a much smaller population. That demographic asymmetry is real, but the ratio of 76:0.04 alone does not prove misallocation. Protecting a trafficked child, running a functional Child Welfare Committee (“CWC”) with qualified members, and rehabilitating a child in conflict with the law are intensive, case-specific interventions where the cost per child substantially exceeds the cost of enrolling that child in a school that already exists. At ₹1,822 crore in total child protection funding nationally in 2025-26, the per-child allocation for this population is strikingly thin.

The institutional consequences are documented and recent. The India Justice Report (2025) published a dedicated study on juvenile justice capacity across the country, finding that as of October 2023, 55% of 1,00,904 cases before 362 Juvenile Justice Boards (“JJBs”) remained pending, with over 50,000 children in conflict with the law caught in the backlog. One in four JJBs operated without the full bench that the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015 (“JJ Act”) legally requires. Pendency ranged from 83% in Odisha to 35% in Karnataka. For a child in Odisha, this means waiting over a year for a JJB – more than triple the JJ Act’s four-month timeline. Separately, understaffed CWCs in multiple states meet less than once a month, leaving children in institutional care without the legally mandated periodic review. What these figures represent, concretely, is the operational condition of a protection system functioning on 0.04% of the Union Budget.

Mission Vatsalya, the flagship child welfare scheme, has nominally recovered from its COVID-era contraction with the 2025-26 budget estimate at ₹1,500 crore, up from approximately ₹900 crore in 2021-22. However, the government’s revised estimates and actual expenditure have historically fallen below budget estimates: Actual Mission Vatsalya expenditure in 2023-24 stood at ₹1,391 crore, which is below even the budget estimate. In real terms, ₹1,500 crore in 2025 purchases considerably less than ₹1,500 crore in 2020, given cumulative inflation and a substantially larger economy.

Comparatively, India’s entire child-related budget stands at 0.33% of GDP in 2025-26. South Africa, a comparable middle-income economy, allocates 4.6% of GDP to social protection. Of this, its child-specific social grants, such as the Child Support Grant, reach approximately 13 million children, accounting for roughly 1.2% of GDP. A direct per-child comparison is imprecise given the difference in coverage populations; what the contrast does establish is that India’s decision to direct 0.04% of the Union Budget toward child protection is a domestic compositional choice, not a fiscal inevitability.

The Transfer Problem: How Fiscal Design Compounds State Inequality

India operates under genuine fiscal constraints. The target fiscal deficit of 4.4% of GDP for 2025-26 limits expansion across sectors, and health, infrastructure, and defence carry legitimate competing claims. These constraints explain why the total available for children is limited. However, they do not explain the composition of that limited total: why protection receives 0.04% of the Union Budget while education receives over 76% of the child budget. Composition is a policy choice, not a resource constraint.

Beyond composition lies the separate question of what allocated funds actually reach children. Samagra Shiksha, which operationalises the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education (“RTE Act”), recorded ₹15,843 crore in unspent funds in 2023-24 – a pattern that has recurred across multiple financial years and has been repeatedly flagged in Comptroller and Auditor General (“CAG”) reports on centrally sponsored schemes.

The structural cause is not purely administrative failure. Under cost-sharing frameworks for centrally sponsored schemes, states must provide matching contributions and submit utilisation certificates for previously released funds before fresh tranches are released. In principle, this mechanism ensures accountability. In practice, it creates a compounding disadvantage for fiscally weaker states. Bihar’s unspent amounts under centrally sponsored child schemes have exceeded 30% in recent years, while the state government has simultaneously argued that the Centre releases only approximately 36% of committed scheme funds. Both sides are partially accurate. The Centre carries its own release delays; Bihar faces genuine absorption constraints. The matching mechanism, however, amplifies both problems simultaneously: a state unable to frontload contributions while awaiting delayed central releases is penalised on both fronts. Critically, low state expenditure is then recorded centrally as low demand, and subsequent allocations are reduced accordingly.

Applying an equal matching requirement to structurally unequal fiscal capacities is not neutral administration; it is regressive by design. A child in Bihar holds the same Article 21A entitlement as a child in Maharashtra. A funding architecture that systematically prevents Bihar from accessing centrally committed funds for children does not reflect that constitutional equivalence. A differentiated allocation formula, weighted by state fiscal capacity, child deprivation indicators, and scheme absorption capacity, is not merely a preferable policy; given the constitutional stakes analysed below, it is arguably required.

 Article 21A confers an enforceable fundamental right to free and compulsory education on every child aged six to fourteen. Article 41, though a Directive Principle not directly enforceable, directs the State to secure the right to education within the limits of its economic capacity, and has been read by the Court as an interpretive guide to the scope of Article 21A. When a centrally designed fiscal transfer mechanism predictably and recurrently prevents certain states from accessing funds committed for the precise purpose of fulfilling that right, the mechanism acquires a constitutional dimension. The Supreme Court’s reasoning in Unnikrishnan J.P. v. State of Andhra Pradesh establishes that constitutional rights cannot be hollowed out by administrative arrangements that make their realisation structurally impossible. A matching contribution framework that systematically forecloses rights access for children in Bihar, as a structural feature of the design, sits uneasily with those obligations, even if no single budget decision is individually challengeable.

The 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments created a framework for fiscal devolution to Panchayati Raj Institutions (“PRIs”) and Urban Local Bodies (“ULBs”) that could meaningfully localise child welfare planning. That potential has remained largely inactivated in the child welfare domain, as fiscal devolution to PRIs and ULBs has not been accompanied by the specific child welfare grants and disaggregated budgeting mandates that would make it operational.

The Design Failure: When Spending More Means Reaching Less

The RTE Act has performed well by its own metrics: enrolment for children aged 6-14 exceeds 98% in rural India, school infrastructure and gender parity in attendance both improved. However, ASER 2024 reveals a different picture on outcomes: only 48.8% of Grade 5 children across all schools could read a Grade 2-level text, falling to 44.8% in government schools, and barely 30.7% could solve a basic division problem. The Constitution did not envision education as mere attendance, but meaningful learning. NEP 2020 and the NIPUN Bharat Mission acknowledge this failure by targeting the foundational literacy and numeracy gaps that the RTE framework produced over a decade of implementation. They are a credible response to a documented problem. Whether they can escape the same conditional transfer constraints and input-measurement logic that created the problem remains the central question.

PM POSHAN presents a parallel case. It has genuinely improved school attendance, particularly among children from disadvantaged communities, an achievement that deserves recognition. NFHS-5 data, however, show only modest progress on nutrition outcomes: stunting declined from 38.4% to 35.5%, wasting from 21.0% to 19.3%. Attributing this to scheme failure in isolation would be analytically wrong. Malnutrition has multiple determinants, such as maternal health, sanitation infrastructure, poverty levels, and disease burden, that a school feeding programme was never designed to address independently. That gap between designed scope and expected outcome is itself a product of the fragmented architecture.

The fiscal architecture reflects this fragmentation directly. Education is budgeted separately from nutrition, nutrition from health, and health from protection. Each ministry accounts for its own inputs, and none of them is assessed against whether the child is actually thriving. A malnourished child cannot learn effectively. A child living with violence cannot benefit from a school feeding programme. A child caught in a JJB backlog of over 50,000 pending cases cannot access any developmental programme in any meaningful sense. These are not novel observations; they follow from the elementary fact of what childhood is. Yet India’s fiscal architecture proceeds as though the connections do not exist.

The persistence of this fragmented architecture has an identifiable political economy. Measuring inputs is administratively manageable and politically visible: enrolments can be announced, meals counted, and immunisation rates reported. A child who cannot read despite being enrolled, or a trafficking survivor without a functional CWC, appears in no ministry’s success metrics. Child protection beneficiaries are among the most politically invisible populations in the country; children themselves do not vote and cannot lobby; they generate no departmental success metric. Across successive budgets, this invisibility has produced the systematic deprioritisation documented in Part I.

Recommendations

The first correction to the failures identified above is to establish a legislative minimum floor for child protection spending, either through a condition attached to tied grants from the Sixteenth Finance Commission (report due October 2026) requiring states to maintain a minimum per-child protection expenditure, or through a Parliamentary amendment to the JJ Act prescribing a non-negotiable Union Budget floor for child protection. The two routes are complementary: the Finance Commission mechanism targets state-level spending; or the legislative floor addresses central allocation directly. A floor of at least 0.5% of the Union Budget for child protection, still a fraction of education’s 76% share, would ensure minimal institutional functionality for CWCs and JJBs. The BfC methodology that HAQ: Centre for Child Rights has refined over two decades provides a ready analytical basis for benchmarking a credible recalibration of sectoral ratios.

The second correction is to redesign the conditional transfer architecture for centrally sponsored child schemes. A needs-based allocation formula, weighted by state fiscal capacity, child deprivation indicators, and scheme absorption capacity, would interrupt the regressive dynamics that currently disadvantage Bihar and similar states. Trust-based tranche releases, where funds are disbursed upfront without prior utilisation certificates in high-deprivation districts based on past compliance records, would break the lapse-and-underfund cycle. Where Centre-State disputes over release timelines persist (as they currently do), a transparent, publicly tracked release schedule would create accountability on both sides without penalising children for institutional failures on either.

The third correction is to reconceptualise children as integrated rights-bearers rather than as welfare recipients distributed across departments. This requires two simultaneous interventions: first, cross-sectoral outcome tracking that measures education, nutrition, health, and protection together rather than in administrative isolation. This could be operationalised through a joint report by the Ministries of Education, Health, and Women and Child Development, with a shared set of child-level indicators (learning, nutrition status, protection access) which will be published alongside the Union Budget annually. Second, genuine fiscal devolution to PRIs and ULBs under the 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments, accompanied by specific child welfare grants and disaggregated budgeting mandates, so that local bodies can plan around the interconnected reality of a child’s life rather than around central ministry silos.

Conclusion

India’s child finance architecture does not merely underfund children. It misunderstands them. Sectoral inertia consistently crowds out child protection at the allocation stage, not because resources are unavailable, but because the protection budget carries no structural floor and no organised constituency. Conditional transfer mechanisms push the poorest states furthest behind, compounding the inter-state inequality in rights realisation that the constitutional framework is meant to address. At the programme stage, input metrics substitute for outcome measures, and the State credits itself for progress that children in its care have often not received.

The constitutional framework demands more than this. Article 21A makes education a fundamental right; Articles 39(f) and 45 direct the State towards children’s healthy development and early care; and Article 21 jurisprudence, since Unnikrishnan has brought children’s welfare within the scope of enforceable constitutional concern. A fiscal architecture that systematically forecloses their realisation is not a matter of budgetary preference alone. Until India begins measuring the child, not the enrolment rate, not the meals distributed, but whether a child in Bihar can actually read, learn, and remain safe, the fiscal system will continue producing that particular kind of progress: the kind that appears sound in budget documents but falls short in a child’s life.