Open Access
ARTICLE
Investment Without Equity? Government Funding Allocation and Its Educational Returns in CM Rise and Other Government Schools of Madhya Pradesh
Issue Vol. 2 No. 05 (2026): June July 2026 --- Section Articles --- Published Date: 2026-07-30
Abstract
Madhya Pradesh's CM Rise Schools initiative channels substantially more public funding into a designated set of government schools than the state's conventional Government Schools receive, on the premise that concentrated investment will produce proportionately superior educational outcomes. This paper examines that premise directly, comparing government funding allocation and academic achievement returns across the same sample of 20 schools (10 CM Rise Schools and 10 other Government Schools) drawn from the Ujjain division of Madhya Pradesh used in earlier comparative work on this initiative. CM Rise Schools receive approximately 3.2 times the average annual grant of other Government Schools (₹79 lakh against ₹24.8 lakh per school) and 2.5 times the per-student funding (₹28,000 against ₹11,000), yet recorded academic achievement (percentage of Class 10 students scoring above 60% in 2023-24) of 52.1% against 45.3%, a gap of only 6.8 percentage points. Expressed as achievement generated per rupee of per-student funding, other Government Schools are approximately 2.2 times more cost-efficient than CM Rise Schools. The paper argues that this pattern reflects diminishing marginal returns to concentrated infrastructure investment once basic adequacy thresholds are met, and that it raises a genuine equity concern: whether the same public funds, distributed more broadly rather than concentrated in a designated set of schools, would generate larger aggregate learning gains across the state's government school system as a whole.
