B.G. Kher Committee Report: Strengthening Local Role in Education

When India gained independence in 1947, one of the most pressing challenges in education was not just expanding access – it was deciding who should be responsible for running schools at the ground level. Should all decisions flow down from state governments, or could local communities play a meaningful role? To address this question directly, the Government of India appointed a committee in 1951 under the chairmanship of B.G. Kher, then Chief Minister of Bombay. The resulting report – formally titled the Report of the Committee on the Relationship Between State Governments and Local Bodies in the Administration of Primary Education – became a landmark reference in India’s journey toward decentralized educational governance.

Background: Why the Kher Committee was formed 🔗

The push for this committee came from an unlikely starting point. At the 18th meeting of the Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE) in 1948, the Government of Bihar raised the question of how state governments and local bodies should share responsibility for elementary education. The Ministry of Education responded by appointing this committee in 1951, with B.G. Kher as Chairman and eleven other members.

The committee’s terms of reference were specific: examine the existing setup of local educational administration across different states, understand the degree to which state governments had assumed more powers, and recommend a broadly uniform pattern that all states could adopt with minor variations. This was not a theoretical exercise. In the post-independence period, India was actively working to shift from centralized command-and-control approaches in education toward more participatory, decentralized management at district, block, and village levels. The Kher Committee was among the earliest institutional steps in that direction.

The core problem the committee sought to solve was a structural one. When all educational decisions were made by the state government, there was a consistent disconnect between policy and local reality. Schools in rural areas had needs – related to language, infrastructure, community customs, and local priorities – that a centralized bureaucracy was simply not equipped to address efficiently.

Key recommendations of the B.G. Kher Committee 🔗

The committee’s recommendations covered several dimensions of educational governance – from the role of village panchayats to the control of private schools and the allocation of financial resources. Here is a detailed look at what it proposed.

Associating local bodies with primary education 🔗

The committee’s foundational recommendation was that it would be an advantage to associate local bodies with the administration of primary education in some form or other. This was a deliberate policy stance – not merely a suggestion, but a formal recognition that the state alone could not effectively manage primary education across India’s vast and diverse geography.

The committee envisioned this association working differently depending on the type and capacity of the local body involved – city corporations, authorized municipalities, non-authorized municipalities, village school committees, and district school boards were each assigned distinct powers and responsibilities.

Formation of school committees 🔗

One of the most concrete recommendations concerned the creation of educational bodies at the local level. In all village panchayats and smaller municipalities that had been given only limited control over primary education, the local body was required to elect a school committee and delegate to it the task of supervising local schools. In larger municipalities and district boards, a formal school board was to be constituted, supported by an administrative officer with adequate authority to manage day-to-day school administration.

These school committees were not merely advisory. They were meant to bring parents, community leaders, and teachers together into a functioning governance unit that could take real decisions about how local schools were run. This idea of community-based school oversight – radical for its time – would go on to influence later policies including Village Education Committees (VECs) under the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan decades later.

Role of village panchayats 🔗

The committee placed village panchayats at the center of educational governance at the grassroots level. Panchayats were seen as the most appropriate institution to bridge the gap between the state and the community. The report proposed that village panchayats be empowered with direct responsibilities for primary schools within their jurisdiction, including overseeing school functioning, monitoring student attendance, and maintaining school infrastructure.

Crucially, the committee also addressed the financial dimension of this responsibility. In village panchayats, a portion of the total revenue was to be earmarked specifically for primary education. This was not just symbolic – it was meant to create a sustainable local funding base so that schools were not entirely dependent on state allocations that were often delayed or insufficient.

This recommendation aligned with what Article 40 of the Constitution of India directed – that state governments should endow panchayats with such powers and authority as may be necessary to enable them to function as units of self-government, a principle the Kher Committee was operationalizing at the school level well before it became a constitutional imperative.

Division of authority between state and local bodies 🔗

The committee did not recommend handing over all educational powers to local bodies without checks. It carefully delineated which functions should remain with the state and which could be devolved. Inspection was to be regarded as a duty of the government, to be carried out by government officers who would remain directly under the state and not under local bodies. Similarly, the responsibility for training primary teachers was to remain solely with state governments.

However, local bodies were given meaningful operational authority. On the question of curriculum, while the state retained the power to define courses of study, local bodies were authorized, with prior approval of the Director of Education, to introduce variations in the prescribed curricula as they deemed necessary in view of local conditions. This was a significant concession – it acknowledged that a single national curriculum could not serve India’s diverse linguistic and cultural landscape without adaptation.

Regarding textbooks, the committee recommended that state governments prescribe the books to be used in primary schools, but where multiple books were prescribed for a subject, the local body was free to choose any one of the prescribed books for its schools. This balanced state oversight with local flexibility.

Finance and grants 🔗

The committee made clear that local bodies could not fulfill their educational responsibilities without adequate funding. It recommended that not less than 60% of a state’s total education expenditure should be spent on primary education, and that state grants to local bodies should be structured on a combination of proportional grants (to ensure broad equalization), special grants for backward or disadvantaged areas, and specific-purpose grants. Importantly, grants for all primary education – whether voluntary or compulsory – were to be statutory in nature, removing the uncertainty of discretionary disbursement.

Private schools and local oversight 🔗

The committee also addressed the question of private primary schools operating within local jurisdictions. Local bodies were to be generally in charge of all primary schools in their areas, whether maintained directly or managed by private agencies, and the authority to control and guide private primary schools was to vest in the local bodies themselves. The state retained specific powers – particularly around granting or withdrawing recognition – but the day-to-day oversight was meant to sit with the local body. Any party aggrieved by a school board’s decision had the right to appeal to the Director of Education.

Impact on educational administration in India 🔗

The Kher Committee Report did not lead to overnight transformation. Implementation was gradual and uneven across states. But its influence on the trajectory of educational governance in India is difficult to overstate.

Encouraging local governance participation 🔗

By formally recommending that village panchayats and local bodies take an active role in school management, the committee helped shift the ideological basis of educational administration. It moved the conversation away from a purely top-down model and toward one in which local communities became more responsible for the educational outcomes of their children, and this sense of ownership helped improve educational standards in many areas.

The idea of school committees proposed by the Kher Committee was a forerunner to the Village Education Committees (VECs) established under later programmes. Village education committees, involving elected representatives of local panchayat bodies along with other community and school representatives, were eventually set up across many states to implement the local governance process in education.

Laying the ground for constitutional and policy reforms 🔗

The report’s emphasis on structured local participation in education anticipated a series of larger reforms that would follow. The 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments of 1992 empowered local governance institutions like Panchayati Raj and Urban Local Bodies, providing legal mechanisms for community participation in educational planning – a constitutional realization of principles the Kher Committee had articulated four decades earlier.

Even the National Policy on Education of 1986 further emphasized the importance of local participation in educational governance, echoing the Kher Committee’s insistence that communities cannot remain passive recipients of state-designed education.

Challenges in implementation 🔗

The committee’s recommendations faced real obstacles. Many village panchayats lacked the trained personnel, infrastructure, and financial capacity to take on school management responsibilities effectively. Issues such as inadequate financial resources, bureaucratic inertia, political interference, and social hierarchies continued to impede the functioning of local bodies in many parts of the country. The financial decentralization aspect, in particular, was resisted by many states where local bodies simply could not sustain the required expenditure.

Additionally, the involvement of panchayats in educational governance has often been minimal in practice, with their engagement being mainly in the construction and maintenance of school buildings, while their role in educational planning and decision-making has remained limited. Lack of awareness about their roles, inadequate revenue-generating powers, and political co-option have been persistent barriers.

Despite these gaps, the Kher Committee’s vision has never been abandoned. It set the direction – that primary education is not solely a state government affair, but a shared responsibility that must be owned by the communities it serves.

Relevance of the Kher Committee today 🔗

More than seven decades after the report was submitted, its core insights remain pertinent. In decentralized management, the flow of delivery becomes quicker and decision-making easier and more realistic when planning decisions can be taken at a lower spatial level. This principle – self-evident in theory – continues to drive education policy debates in India, from the functioning of School Management Committees under the Right to Education Act to the devolution of funds to gram panchayats for school infrastructure.

The Kher Committee understood something that still holds true: decisions about children’s schooling are best made by those who know those children – their parents, their communities, and their local representatives. Centralized systems, no matter how well-designed, cannot substitute for that proximity.

What do you think? If village panchayats were given meaningful financial and administrative control over local schools today, what safeguards would be necessary to ensure that power is used equitably and effectively? And do you think India’s current school governance structures genuinely reflect the decentralized vision the Kher Committee proposed – or has the gap between policy intent and ground reality persisted?

References

1. http://www.edugyan.in/2017/02/committee-on-relationship-between-state.html
2. https://www.niepa.ac.in/download/Publications/Occasional_Paper-_48_R_S_Tyagi.pdf
3. https://www.constitutionofindia.net/members/b-g-kher/
4. https://www.fao.org/4/ad346e/ad346e03.htm
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7. https://educationforallinindia.com/decentralized-education-planning-in-india-a-comprehensive-narrative-of-institutional-transformation/
8. https://byjus.com/free-ias-prep/kothari-commission/
9. https://www.ijcrt.org/papers/IJCRT2407417.pdf